DR: slave working or not working

[fraggle]

]Hello,
I really wish to have a working render farm one day instead of "not responding" or slavse not rendering after the first frame.
For example, at the moment I do have to open all slave session and close it after each frame, otherwise the slave are not rendering. This works or not, sometime after 3 open/close session, sometime not, slaves will never show up again.
All slave are under Win Server 2008 R2, and the master under win7 pro.

I notice that the max session on each slaves have to be killed manually after the end of the rendering of each frame to get the slaves working again.
"restart slave on render end" is check inside the DR setting.

So I have to stand up all night just to kill the process on all slaves after every frame! A real nightmare to be polite.
Thanks
[ATTACH=CONFIG]21605[/ATTACH

[vlado]

Hm, I don't think we've ever tried that on Windows server. It may be possible that something prevents the "restart slaves on render end" option from working there. Is it reproducible on other OSes?

Best regards,
Vlado

[fraggle]

The rendering was about several frame, so the max dummy must keep running and rendering all frame until the last frame and not only the first one.

[matanov]

Everything seems fine in my tests (local win7 and win 2008 R2 slave). I tried different scenarios (restart slaves on render end) and 3ds max was auto restarted after rendering (single and animation) and I was able to start a new render after that without restarting the spawner or killing manually 3ds max.

[fraggle]

Did you try with LC/LC as first pass on the master, then IR (incremental) / LC from file for the second pass through DR?
Are your spawner and max dummy registered as service?
I notice that while the master start the next frame calculation, all slave are just keeping the same amount of ram than during the rendering job and all node's CPU are at 25% like they are going some calculation. They can keep this state forever if I don 't kill the job.
Opening or closing a user session on the slave kill the process as well.

The beauty pass is just finished with IR map from file/none and the slave works normally under the same scene.

[matanov]

Using you post as a guide, I tried this:

1. On master: LC/LC, don't render final image(checked), use camera path, mode: fly-through then save the file
2. Master+slave: IR (incremental add to current map)/LC from file, don't render final image(checked) then save to file (I tried also "Multiframe incremental")
3. Master+slave: Render final with IR (from file)/none

I didn't crossed any problems during these steps - slave was working as expected.

btw you asked about spawner and max dummy registered as service - only the spawner is registred, what do you mean by registering the dummy ?

[fraggle]

The beauty pass is just finished with IR map from file/none and the slave works normally under the same scene.

In fact the slave are just popping up, then disappearing constantly.

[vlado]

Is this on any scene, or on this particular one?

Best regards,
Vlado

[fraggle]

I update all server to 2.5 (was 2.4) under Chaos group support request and sure now everything seems to work because I loose more than half server during the license upgrade.
If fill like the lucky guy that have been upgrade for 100 bucks, from second class to business class :

"Thanks for the upgrade, for such a small price I'm now traveling with the top business man". Is the trip going to be faster?
"You're welcome sir, you have been upgrade in business class but due to budget restriction we are flying with only 2 reactor instead of 4".
"Right, but you did not answer the question: are this reactor more powerful to reach the destination on time with less reactor ?"
"No sir, but you can enjoy the landscape, you are now in business class".

So I'm now looking at half the bucket I used to have with a render engine that is not twice powerful as it was! So basically, at the end, I paid to have a slower render, so simple!
I now really fill like It was clearly a mistake to joined the business class!

But thanks anyway for your support, because at the end, it is what we paid for, a good support.