DR settings in the vfb

[robin_lawrie]

i know it sounds strange, but it would be great if it was possible to add dr to a job that was already running, for example you set a high res still render off with bucket rendering, and go home. come in in the morning, its been going all night, but is only half done because you forgot your aa settings were cranked from rendering an animation. (if it sounds specific, im living it this morning)

in this case you have only one option, restart the render with DR on and fixed settings, throw a load of machines at it and hopefully dont miss the deadline by too much. you lose everything you rendered.

another scenario, you are rendering with DR, come back in the morning and find your second machine did a windows update and restarted.. it never picked up the dr job again. so render, again, half done. same solution, restart render and lose 8+ hours of rendering.

if we could enable DR on a job that was already rendering, or ask it to check for available servers and add them, without stopping a render, that would be wonderful.

i suggest in the VFB just because that remains interactive during rendering.

theoretically possible?

[matanov]

You can actually add/remove DR servers while rendering. You should have enabled DR before starting the rendering to have that option, though:



Also, in the case where a machine is restarted - as long as it is in the list for active DR servers and there is a running spawner after the restart - it should pick up the job again automatically.

[robin_lawrie]

well i never noticed that button before! excellent. a small improvement might be to allow enabling DR from there too, in case you have a situation like mine.

[robin_lawrie]

Y
Also, in the case where a machine is restarted - as long as it is in the list for active DR servers and there is a running spawner after the restart - it should pick up the job again automatically.

ive had quite a few times where this does not appear to happen, or at least quickly.. ive restarted a server and looked for signs its picking up the job (network activity, max ram use climbing, log window opening etc) and after 5-10 minutes, nothing. does it only poll at certain intervals for restarted servers?

[vasil.minkov]

... does it only poll at certain intervals for restarted servers?

There is no polling. It rather works by broadcasting network messages. Servers transmit broadcast message upon startup. A server also transmits the same broadcast message when it finishes its render job.
The client is listening for broadcast messages. Upon message reception it is checked if the server is in the list of enabled servers and if so then the server is connected.
The network should be able to pass broadcast messages from servers to client - client and servers should be in the same subnet.