Hey Nick,
yeah we've had our share of fun with them...
*Short story*: We've analyzed and reported the issue, it's sort of
"explainable" and reproducible to a certain extent. But I wouldn't hold my
breath for getting a fast fix for this as it...
So we adapted our renderfarm manager to find the offending blades and
restart the renderjob on these ones automatically. Typically the lock files
disappear when the corresponding offending xsibatch process is not alive
anymore. So bottom line this issue "costs" us only roughly 3-5 minutes of
downtime on a handful of blades which is a non-issue in relation to our
overall render times. But it still feels a bit dodgy and of course I'd
rather have it resolved.
*Long story: *This is what happens as far as I understand it:
1.) On startup the contents of every linked workgroup get parsed by every
machine in order to correctly identify and register all
plugins/shaders/compounds/...
2.) For .xsicompound and .xsirtcompound files (and only for those, God
knows why) the parsing machine will use a locking mechanism:
- for foo.xsicompound create a lock file named
foo.xsicompound.lock (after first making sure that this file does not
already exist)
- parse foo.xsicompound
- delete the lock file
3.) When loads of machines do this at pretty much the same time the chance
rises for collisions. Also if your file server is not very good with
handling a lot of requests for interaction with lots of TINY files this
will also dramatically rise the chance for collisions
Also I'd love to hear the reason for this whole lock-file thingy. I just
don't get it - this should just be text-file read access, just the way ALL
other non-compiled workgroup items are alreay handled...
Hope that helps a bit...
Cheers, Martin
--
Martin Chatterjee
[ Freelance Technical Director ]
[ http://www.chatterjee.de ]
[ https://vimeo.com/chatterjee ]
On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Stephen Blair <stephenrbl...@gmail.com>wrote:
> I've seen that come up from time to time on this list, and in support.
>
> usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS14206145
>
>
>
> On 02/11/2012 1:08 AM, Nick Angus wrote:
>
> Has anyone encountered compounds generating lock files when rendering on
> a renderfarm connected to a workgroup?****
>
> It seems to be the same four compounds, although they are all unrelated
> and from different places. This has never happened before and has thrown a
> bit of a spanner in the works!****
>
> ** **
>
> Just thought I would check if anyone has had this happened before.****
>
> ** **
>
> Cheers,Nick****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
>
>
