Back Burner Problem

[Infrared digital]

For example - I will have 3 render jobs lined up in BB when I leave to go home at night. When I come in the next day 2 of the jobs are done but the last one isn't. Not much unusual here except that, half of my render servers are sitting IDLE when they should be rendering.

Why is this that some of the machines will become idle and with no obvious way to get them going again without restarting all the machines ?

[instinct]

The reason usually is that task blocking is enabled by default. Taskblocking means that a slav is getting assigned more than one task at a time. This can greatly reduce rendertimes as the slave can render 10 frames in a row without reloading the whole scene. With multiplee jobs this can sadly also leave to the Problem you're acing. One would wish that in cases like these BB would re-assign the tasks to the idle slaves but it doesnt :/

Regards,
Thorsten

[Infrared digital]

Can I turn off task blocking and if I do, is it going to take longer to render every scene that I send to BB ?

[instinct]

As a rule of thumb the longer the rendertimes of a single task the more useul is taskblocking. BUT the more time is wasted if you run into a situation as you did of course. Longer Rendertimes is only partial true tho. actually the longer a scene takes to LOAD the more useful is taskblocking. You can turn it of in the manager settings or override the global setting when submitting a job. Should be on the Advanced dialogue in the submission dialogue.

Regards,
Thorsten

[Infrared digital]

Hi Thorsten

Thanks for your help. I have disabled the task blocking and so far so good !

[andrewjohn81]

I think the extra time is mostly in loading the file and geometry. For files, say under 50MB or so of total data, that aren't big it shouldn't make a huge difference since that will load quickly.
Many of my files sizes are closer to 1gig, so it is a necessity. Loading the file and geometry to where it actually starts rendering can take 20 minutes when the render itself only takes 10. In this case I Really want to keep the file open and just keep on rendering frames as long as possible.

I've also had some strange problems where if servers are turned off when you submit, even if you say submit using all servers, it won't pick up the servers once they are turned on. That usually works though. I'm not sure why that happens occasionally. Check to make sure they are actually assigned to all the machines if you get to the office and only a few machines are rendering with a bunch of frames left. It's happened here before.

[mike_kennedy]

One way to keep this from happening is to stager the priority levels of each job to occur in the order you want so that jobs submitted later won't start until the higher priority ones are done. BB isn't supposed to do that, rebooting the manager machine will normally sort it out, for a while anyways.....