Steven Caron wrote:
> I dont want to talk bad about deadline on the setup front cause i
> haven't had to set it up.. but i am using it now and my god it is slow.
> it takes for ever to refresh, startup, modify jobs, etc
[...]
How big is your render farm? And how fast is your network? And what
operating system is the server with the "DeadlineRepository"-directory
running?
We're running the latest Deadline (v2.5.22191) here on our Gbit-network
with 6-10 rendernodes. All running Windows XP Pro on dual Xeon Dells.
And what should I say: we're nothing but _extremely_ happy with it.
Performance couldn't be better, feature-wise it's so well-thought
through and through (the built-in remote admin tools are real
timesavers, ...), integration in XSI is perfect (we used "Smedge" before
which was pure horror, when you had many passes and even worse when you
had many passes with different frameranges. All had you be typed in
_manually_ over and over again). The response time from submit dialog to
success message is well within 2 seconds, even under heavy load.
This hasn't always been this way. We once tried to use it in combination
with our affiliates' renderfarm in Hamburg (we're in Düsseldorf here)
and we had very bad response and refresh times, just as you mentioned.
But as we found out this wasn't Deadline's fault but caused by two
things: if you don't use Windows Server but just a WinXP Pro for your
server, you're limited to 10 simultaneous connections if I remember
correctly. This caused much trouble and hickups, because we had ~35-40
machines these times. The second problem was, that the administrator in
Hamburg magically managed to install something completely wrong, and the
whole Deadline server was filled up with over 32.000 logfiles in one
single directory in a few days. Needless to say, that Windows does NOT
like this amount of files. As we had deadlines to fulfill (a pun!! :) )
in Düsseldorf, we finally split our rendernodes and installed Deadline
locally, which solved ALL problems instantly. We're "just" 2 3D TDs
here, and it took us about 2 hours to get Deadline up and running (with
no hickup since 6 months now).
As you can see, I'm not the admin-guy, but even for me it was a pretty
straightforward installation, especially on the client nodes: just click
"next" about 5 times, on your Workstation drop the submit script plugin
VBS into the right directory of XSI and you're ready to fire your first
renderjob!
We didn't test many other renderfarm management softwares, just
BatchServe, Smedge and Deadline. And after Deadline we didn't continue
our search, because it offers all we need and more. Oh, and last but not
least: the support at Franticfilms is excellent and reacts lightning
fast. They coded workarounds and scripts in the earlier days of its XSI
integration in a matter of minutes. :)
CU... Steffen.
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