I know that I, and many others, have posted lots of threads about DR problems. I honestly don’t know why, but we are having STACKS more problems these days than ever before. I was led to believe that Vray 3 was to be a lot more stable than previous versions, and it is one of the big reasons that we upgraded. For us at least, this just isn’t the case. We are regularly having to manually re-start the vray spawner service on each of the nodes by remote desktopping into them - this happens 5-10 times a day on each of our 10 render machines. Its a ball ache and a half.
Typical problems:-
1) The 3dsmax.exe service keeps re-starting
2) A DR job will complete, but then when another job is sent, most/all of the nodes just sit there and do nothing. The ram associated with the 3dsmax.exe service is higher than normal, as though it is ‘clogged up’ somehow. RAM could be about 1.5GB upwards for example.
3) A DR job will be cancelled part way through to make some adjustments but then we have the same problem as 2) above.
4) Some of the nodes take a while to pickup - maybe a minute or so after all the other nodes have started. Our network is gigabit so there really shouldn’t me any headache.
Windows firewall is tuned off everywhere.
All assets ar UNC’d properly - we use spawner as a service so this is critical
I have manually opened 30304 UDP/TCP ports inwards and outwards on each machine
Max/vray is set to restart the nodes on render end.
Couldn’t Chaosgroup offer a service where they log in and check everything is functioning properly? I’d happily pay for this sort of optimisation. My guess is that Chaosgroup don’t really experience issues so they don’t know how to troubleshoot. I NEED a solution to this. It is very very frustrating. Vary version 1 and 2 used to be better IIRC.
The DR in V-Ray 3.0 is not significantly different than V-Ray 2; the major addition is the asset transfer, but other than that it works pretty much exactly as before.
0) Which 3ds Max version do you use? Which backburner version? Did you update/reinstall 3ds Max when you updated V-Ray?
1) Does it work fine, and then begin to restart at some point?
2) Can you get me a V-Ray log file from one of those machines right at that time? Have you tried using the “restart slaves on render end” option?
3) same as 2)
4) same as 2)
5) Yes, our support guys can certainly do a remote session to help you with the setup - best to email support@chaosgroup.com with reference to this thread.
0) We are on Max 2014 SP5 and Backburner is version 2014. We didn’t reinstall or update max when vray was installed. Max takes hours to install, especially on so many machines - is this really necessary?
1) One of our machines is just in a loop at the minute and will not even receive a job. It wasn’t doing this yesterday.
I will email a log file for a looping render node, and send the others when it next happens.
1) One of our machines is just in a loop at the minute and will not even receive a job. It wasn’t doing this yesterday.Ok; go to that machine, log in as the user that you specified the service to run as, open Windows explorer and type %localappdata%\Autodesk\3dsMax\2014 - 64bit\ENU\Network - you should see a file named Max.log - can you send it to me?
2) where is the vray log saved by default?Unless you specified something else in the V-Ray System rollout, it is in the temporary folder for the current user. Again, go to the machine, log in as the user that you specified the service to run as, open Windows explorer and type %temp% - then look for a file called vraylog.txt
is it the spawner log or the vray log you will need? The spaner log seems to be getting updated with each ‘loop’ but the vraylog.txt was last updated on 13/02/2014 and contains only:-
[2014/F/13|17:23:17] ============================================================
[2014/F/13|17:23:17] Console created, V-Ray A for x64 from Jun 7 2013, 22:37:49
[2014/F/13|17:23:17] ============================================================
[2014/F/13|17:23:17] Compiled with Intel C++ compiler, version 12.1
[2014/F/13|17:23:17] Host is 3dsmax, version 16
[2014/F/13|17:23:17] V-Ray DLL version is 2.00.01
Ok thanks, getting there… it looks like 3ds Max crashes while it’s loading, so I need a bit more info. Create a file called CrashHandler.ini in the root folder of 3ds Max (where the 3dsmax.exe file is located) with the following contents:```
; Set DumpInServerMode to 1, if you want to create
; minidumps when using max in network server mode
[SendDmp]
DumpInServerMode=1
SendDmp=0
Now the next time 3ds Max crashes on start, it should produce a file called 3dsmax\_minidump.dmp in the temporary folder for the current user (again, type %temp% in Windows explorer to go there). You might have to move the file somewhere to avoid it being overwritten by the constantly restarting 3ds Max. Send me the crash dump to vlado@chaosgroup.com and hopefully it will tell me what's going wrong.
Best regards,
Vlado
Ok, plan B, but I will need some time to prepare for it. I’ll give you a small tool that runs 3ds Max as a debugger and can intercept the crash; then we’ll set the spawner to run 3ds Max through that tool.
Thanks for your time on this Vlado. Do you think if I set Max to reinstall overnight the problem will likely go away? I don’t want to waste your time when a simple reinstall would work.
I don’t know if a reinstall will help; it would be good to get to the bottom of this anyways.
So I’m attaching a few files:
(*) The pdump tool that runs 3ds Max and writes a crash dump if it crashes;
(*) A modified version of vrayspawner2014 that can run the pdump tool instead of 3ds Max directly (make sure you back up the original from the 3ds Max root);
(*) A vrayspawner.ini file.
Backup the original vrayspawner2014.exe from the 3ds Max root folder; stop the spawner service; unpack the contents of the archive to the 3ds Max root folder overwriting the vrayspawner2014.exe file. Then run the spawner service.
After 3ds Max crashes a few times, send me to vlado@chaosgroup.com the file VRaySpawnerStdOut.txt from the root folder of 3ds Max and the crash dump from %temp%\max_dump.dmp
When I start the spawner service, no 3dsmax.exe appears in task manager. I stopped it, unregistered the spawner as a service then re-registered spawner as a service. Still, after doing this and running the service, 3dsmax.exe does not seem to start up in task manager.
I stopped the service again and manually ran vrayspawner and I get a cycle of these errors (clicking ‘OK’ just ties again and again and again with the same dialogs appearing)
So here is an update. This one should work with the original dbghelp.dll from the 3ds Max root folder, so you can just restore it. Sorry about this, it’s a bit hacky stuff.
