Multiple license server slow down acquisition of license

[Joelaff]

If you set two or three license servers in the licensing settings this slows down the acquisition of a license, even if the primary license server is up and running. If one of the servers, even the tertiary, is completely down then the aquisition of a license takes a VERY long time.

Please have VRay check the license servers using three threads. Once any of the three returns a valid license the aquisition of a license should immediately terminate with success. It should not wait for the other servers to reply at all.

If this is not your liking then trying them one at a time is fine, so long as it is in order, and once a license is acquired the alternate servers are not checked and the render proceeds immediately.

We had to go through and set all nodes to use a single license server to avoid this slow down. We noticed it because we had set up a tertiary server as a back up during the last update. It is really nice to be able to configure three servers, but this shouldn't slow rendering down. Remember, many render managers use 3dsmaxcmd.exe, and launch a new process every few frames, or even every frame. So this overhead of waiting for a license adds up.

Thanks.

[vlado]

Hm, that's strange; will try to reproduce this here. You can use the env. var VRAY_CONNECT_TIMEOUT to control how long V-Ray will wait for a license server to respond (the value is in milliseconds).

I don't think multithreading will help much for this, but it is definitely very likely to introduce issues If there is a problem, there should be another way to fix it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Joelaff]

Thanks for looking into it. I get multithreaded network code is a bitch, with blocking DNS and all that.

Just going through one by one is probably sufficient. The biggest slowdown was when we added the tertiary, and the machine was offline most of the time (no machine at that ip so no ACK at all).

We may try lowerng the timeout, thanks.

[tashko.zashev]

We could not reproduce the issue here.
Please let us know the exact V-Ray version that you are using as well as some information on your network setup?
In "V-Ray client license settings" do you set the license server using the IP address of the machine or servername?

Does the issue appear only when you have "Alternate license server 2" set or any of the license server machine is turned off?

[Joelaff]

The problem was the worst in this setup:

Server 1 assigned the the local DNS name of the actual license server machine (we have a local DNS server and it is a non-FQDN, host name only)

Server 2 assigned to the local DNS name of another machine that is turned on, but does not have the license server running. It's firewall is configured to allow those packets to pass, so it would return a port closed message, rather than just drop the packets.

Server 3 assigned to an IP address that does not have a machine running.

This was the setup that caused a really long delay. Removing the third server fixed most of it. Removing the second server seemed to speed it up further, but I did not actually time that.

Thanks.

[tashko.zashev]

Thank you very much for your update.
In order to be sure that the problem is not in the local DNS, please try to use the IP address of the machines instead.

We will keep trying to reproduce it here. It is very odd, because the primary license should be taken right away in this case.

[Joelaff]

Same thing with all ip addresses.

[tashko.zashev]

Same thing with all ip addresses.

Thank you.
Since the problem can't be reproduced at our side, the only solution we can offer is to remotely connect to your machine/s and troubleshoot it further.
So if this is important for your workflow and the workaround with removing the third node is not an option for you, please send us an email to support at chaosgroup.com