backburner nodes sitting idle

[tricky]

I am having a really annoying problem.

I have a renderfarm of about 15 machines which have been working well for me. However, every now and again, one or two of the machines just sit there idle when there are plenty of frames still to be rendered.

At the moment, I have 9 of the machines sitting idle! How do I get them going on this sequence of frames? I have tried all obvious things - restarting manager. Restarting server. Rebooting the machines. Right clicking and assigning to selected jobs. Nothing seems to work....


.....edit....
As there were no other jobs waiting apart from this one, I chose to change the priority of the job to critical, and suddenly all of my machines have woken up! Any ideas why this is happening?

[EricKlein]

I saw some things on this some time ago on the Max forum...I'll try to find the specific thread, but I believe it has to do with the manager making assumtions about the workload of each server based on how many frames are in the job...meaning if there are 200 frames and 15 servers, it might only tap ten for the job...there's a txt file (which I can't remember) you can modify to take this 'feature' away...

e.

[tricky]

That sounds like a really useful 'feature'....not.

[EricKlein]

Here it is:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...&siteID=123112

e.

[dellis]

You might want to check the scheduler as well.....that little utility that allows you to set the days and hours the machine is allowed to render.

[tricky]

Here it is:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...&siteID=123112

e.

Are you sure this is the right thing? Isn't this the same as Task Blocking, in which case I have disabled that from the Advanced tab in the Network Render dialogue box.