DR nodes needs to be restarted in intervals

[Morne]

Hi all. I'm having these problems and just wanted to know if I'm alone in this or if there are others experiencing the same (1.5 sp1). When (DR)ing a scene of anything from about 120mb and larger (and sometimes smaller) of any resolution for stills, and I use more than one DR node, they immediately come up with "not responding" errors. Sometimes if I only use 1 or 2 DR nodes, the slaves will render, but when I use more they drop out from the start. While rendering, I then physically restart one of the slaves, and then it eventually starts rendering the scene. As soon as that slave starts rendering, I then restart the next one, and so on and so on until they all eventually start rendering. If I restart them all at the same time, they dont render. So now as a rule whenever I use DR, as soon as I hit "render" I restart the slaves with about 2 - 3 minute intervals until they all render. This seems to be an intermittent problem mainly with complex and/or large scenes. Workstation has 8Gig RAM, Slaves have 4gig RAM. Even if I try with a workstation with 4Gig Ram, its the same. I also tried increasing dynamic memory. The IT guy assures me that the network switch has enough through-put. Its the same in the middle of the night when nobody else is using the server.

Workstation and slaves are WinXP 64. Also tried it with a Vista64 worstation, still the same.

Any thoughts?

[idesign]

With some senes i have the that problem... normaly is some object.. a stupid object..

[dcullipher]

We have expereinced a similar issue on multiple scenes. Unfortunately it is hard to troubleshoot. We are constantly restarting the DR nodes.

I do wish there was a way to debug the scene further but the DR log does not provide specific info to show a problem.

[Morne]

yes this is true, My thoughts are that something must be wrong with DR itself. My scenes are far from perfect, but I went down the road of deleting object by object far too many times to think that it has something to do with my scene. Only other thing that I'm geussing is that it is hardware or network related, however my 1st choice is still DR problems. Obviously I can be wrong about this.

So untill the clever people here figure out the problem, myself and others here it seems will continue having this problem and we will continue to troubleshoot untill we pinpoint the culprit. It doesn't stop us from working and VRay is still the best, it's just a tad annoying to restart the slaves every so often since they don't work for no apparent reason...(intermittently)

Anybody with ideas or a solution, please let us know.

Kind Regards,
Morne