Ping Task Time Out Error

[Streetwise]

This may be a bit off topic, but I am sending a 4096x3277 single frame job to Backburner, who then hands it off to three V-Ray nodes. The process has been working great except recently, I have an image that is taking about 6 hours. When it gets to the end, Backburner manager says "ERR Error message: 3dsmax adapter error : Ping task time out." So the job fails and then starts all over again. To test this out, I tried processing a smaller version (1536x1229) of the same image and it worked fine. I have rendered this image in the past at the higher resolution with no issues.

What is a "Ping task" and why is it timing out all of the sudden on a larger render? The job is being rendered to a drive that sits on the same box as the Manager/Monitor. Next, I'm going to try a different room scene and see how that goes.

Again, sorry for the off-topic post.

Thanks

Dave

[FSGFX]

in the backbruner submit window there is an advanced section at the bottom... enable the per job timeout section...
set the wait for max to render time to to 20h... i think your render is taking longer...

[windowlicker]

I've had this happening too, and I do not know of any solution. I have all my render timeouts set to "6000" (100h) and in spite of this, I have experienced that very annoying "Ping task time out".
I've tried searching the A-desk forums, but to no avail. The only thing I can think of is that the render node has problems communicating with the manager. I have had this very sporadically, and I have not been able to reproduce it with any sort of consistency. (I have gotten this error, the job has restarted, then rendered fine on that same node).
I never got the error when using BB2012, only in BB2013. Might be worth a shot reverting to 2012 if it is a persistant error.

[Streetwise]

Thanks. I'll try the Advanced settings next time and see if that helps. I'm hoping I won't need to revert to an older version...

Dave

[voltron7]

wondering if this has solved it? I am experiencing this on large/lengthy renders and it is terrible
It's going nicely, and halfway done and then all of a sudden it decides to start over again from the beginning...worst part is it doesn't even tell you first.

[psanitra]

Seen this error thousand times, from my experience it happens when the machine running the manager is busy. For example if you are running manager on your workstation and working/rendering at the same time, you pretty much get this all the time on win 7. So to avoid this, you need to be running manager on non-rendering machine. OR!, right click on server.exe in task manager,set afininty and remove 2 cores. This way each job will start with 2 less cores, and the error will not happen anymore. So much for what i working for me

[voltron7]

Well, I just got it to work by using the "advanced" button during submission and activating the timeouts to 7000.
Had one rendering going and the BB one completed...I hope it wasn't simply luck.
Thanks for your workaround, I may need to do that, we'll see.

[Joelaff]

We got ping task timeouts with larger scenes that exceed the RAM of the render node. Even a tiny bit of swapping seems to cause BackBurner to ping task timeout and makes that node useless for render that scene. These ping timeouts are NOT the same as the scene timeout that you can configure. I can find no way to configure the ping timeout.

Solved it by switching to Butterfly Net Render as a render manager. Things actually render now, and since we already used BNR for our other software it works nicely to be able to queue jobs with various software in a single queue.

[voltron7]

Thanks for the tip Joelaff, I am going to give BNR a try. I had gotten lucky last time, but tried the advice of psinatra and it seems to fix it...
Thanks guys