Better Swarm Node Management Settings

[SumitK]

The ability to set CPU affinity (tell the V-Ray process it can use certain cores/cpus) to the Swarm process on nodes as well as the ability to set node availability schedules would make the swarm much better.

For instance, you can currently set the affinity of a node using Task Manager, but upon restarting the service or rebooting the computer, the changes are lost.



This would open up an alternative to having dedicated render nodes, and make it so you can use resources that either need some degree of usability while acting as a render node, or are only available during certain times (after hours, etc).

It was also mentioned in another thread, but we really need the ability to obtain a license when it's needed, and not automatically when starting Revit.

[Tania.Metodieva]

There is an option "Number of threads" in V-Ray Swarm that you can use.
It will set the number of rendering threads for V-Ray. To access it please go to
http://servername:24267/configuration

where servername is the IP address of the machine.

Click on the slider in the right-top corner to disable so you can apply the changes.
Enter the number under "Number of threads" field in V-Ray, click Save and Enable from the slider.

Once you have this set you can use the "Copy Configuration" option in V-Ray Swarm to apply the changes on all machines.
For more details, please refer to:
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...mConfiguration

[SumitK]

I never noticed that setting was there! That's awesome.

I still think there should be a schedule/availability of a machine though. Maybe even have different number of thread profiles depending on which tag is used to select that machine.

[barthelemyaix]

Connected topic : The swarm service is very often not started.
It should be active, since it's on "automatic" mode, but for some reason it doesn't.
Anyone having the same trouble ?

[SumitK]

I have noticed that sometimes the swarm node config page won't load for some nodes and leads to a /GET error page until the service is restarted, but the service seems to always start initially on its own.

[dmurrle]

yes same for me Win10 x64, I just told my users to start the service manually after rebooting the machine.

[barthelemyaix]

Yes indeed, we are with Win10 x64 here too, I forgot to mention.
the service is V-Ray Swarm v1.0.0 by the way
Here we can't start the service manually because the non-admin have no right to do that.
But,
Now we (the admin) changed the properties of the service :
Startup type : Automatic (Delayed Start) ( instead of automatic)
It seems to work better. The machine seems to start the service after reboot.

See if it works for you, and feedback please.

[barthelemyaix]

As it could be useful for others, I created a new thread in this category instead :
V-Ray for Revit forums
V-Ray for Revit :: Bugs
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/showth...-automatically

Please go there for new posts

[dmurrle]

I tried the delayed start service today. Does not work for my machines.

[akos_seres]

I was having the same problem with my newly built render farm. All 8 nodes would not start Swarm automatically. I would have to stop Swam service and then start Swarm service which was just tedious for all 8 nodes whenever they would restart. I have since changed from Automatic to Automatic (Delayed Start) and now Swarm starts up after about 2 minutes from booting up. Thanks for the tip. I appreciate it.

What we did in the interim was used Auto Hot Keys and created a shortcut to execute V-Ray Swarm (stop service) wait 2 seconds and then execute V-Ray Swarm (start service). Put the code on an Arduino with a momentary button so that we could initiate it physically from each computer versus having to log onto each node and do it remotely. We are still keeping the buttons in play in case Swarm stops for some reason.