hyperthreading batch instability

[aweidenhammer]

Batch rendering for me in Maya 2010x64 August release build is crashy... in fact, I can't batch a vray job when my machine is hyperthreaded. I have hyperthreading turned off for now, but is that a known issue? Search didn't come up with anything.

Xeon E5530 2.4GHz x2
12 gigs ram

[vlado]

What kind of crashes are you getting? This sounds more like a hardware problem - overheating processors maybe?

Best regards,
Vlado

[aweidenhammer]

no. not overheating. Not a hardware problem that we can track. It is also a problem across all of our systems. We had to turn hyperthreading off our entire farm. It would render like 75% of the time on our farm, until we turned off HT. Then it became much more stable. My workstation does have more of a problem than most batch rendering, but nearly all here have stability issues in batch mode with HT on. Here's an example render log... unfortunately, it doesn't have much info:
Basically, the crash occurs before the scene even starts to render. The mayaBatch process also hangs, stays resident, and keeps Deadline from detecting a failure, so the dead slave just hangs there ad-infinitum. As I said, to solve this we turned off HT, and the farm is much more stable, so we don't see this too much anymore, but I'm surprised no-one has reported this.

4/26/2010

Starting "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2011\bin\mayabatch.exe"
Hardware Renderer : vendor(NVIDIA Corporation), renderer(GeForce GTX 285/PCI/SSE2), version(3.2.0)
fragment API(NVIDIA Cg)
vertex API(Cg vertex programs)
Cg fragment profile(fp30), vertex profile(arbvp1)
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:21] V-Ray: V-Ray for Maya version 1.50.00 from Apr 26 2010, 08:54:29
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:21] V-Ray: V-Ray core version is 1.90.03
File read in 0 seconds.
Result: P:/MGB/VZN/47054/CGI_Working/scenes/fenceLightingNormalsTest01_AW__4632.mb

V-Ray: Starting render
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Loading plugins from "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2011/vray/vrayplugins/vray_*.dll"
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: 94 plugin(s) loaded successfully
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Finished loading plugins.
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Exporting scene to V-Ray.
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Parsing light links time 0h 0m 0.0s (0.0 s)
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Translating scene geometry for V-Ray
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Total time translating scene for V-Ray 0h 0m 0.0s (0.0 s)
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Rendering.
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Pre-render export.
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Pre-render export
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Pre-render export done.
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Rendering frames.
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Updating frame at time 1.00
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Total time updating frame 0h 0m 0.0s (0.0 s)
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Preparing renderer...
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Preparing scene for rendering...
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Preparing scene for frame...
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Compiling geometry...
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Building static raycast accelerator...
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: SDTree statistics:
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Total number of faces stored: 288
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Max tree depth: 11
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Average tree depth: 8.64912
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Number of tree nodes: 143
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Number of tree faces: 708
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Number of tree leafs: 57
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Average faces/leaf: 12.4211
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Memory usage: 1.83 MB
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray error: There was a fatal error rendering the scene.
Error: There was a fatal error rendering the scene.
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Render complete
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: ========================
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Clearing exporter memory...
[2010/Apr/26|12:53:22] V-Ray: Total time clearing exporter memory 0h 0m 0.0s (0.0 s)
Scene P:/MGB/VZN/47054/CGI_Working/scenes/fenceLightingNormalsTest01_AW__4632.mb completed.

[vlado]

Well, I use V-Ray with hyperthreading all the time on my machine; no problems at all...

Best regards,
Vlado

[snivlem]

Fine here too on i7 machines

[Yannick]

Hi I had a similar issue with hyper threading. Turned out that is was a Maya 2010 bug. I change back to Maya 2009 and the problem disappeared.
I haven't tried Maya 2011 to see if the issue is still there.

Yannick

[aweidenhammer]

interesting... so i may be barking up the wrong tree I did some google searching and found there may be some issues with running vray via mayabatch, and suggested possibly using render.exe directly. We will have to experiment with that. Talked to Nederhorst, and his solution is to convert to vrscenes, so we'll have to get that pipeline up and running better. BTW, when I chatted with Nederhorst, he did confirm instability with mayabatch.
Yes, we are 2010, but are slowly converting to 2011... so I'll do some tests of that specifically.

[seq]

No problems here too, using the vrscene route.

Maya 2010 x64 under Windows 7 and Vista 64 on Core i7, Xeon E5520 and E5620.