"Jason A. Pattie" wrote:
> 
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> Ken Murchison wrote:
> > One of the five is the LTSP server as well as a render node.  The other
> > 4 are setup as local_app LTSP clients which have Maya installed and a
> > Spider daemon running (Spider is the distributed render control piece,
> > with the submission taking place on a Win32 box).  I made some small
> > tweaks to rc.local, such as using tmpfs instead of a ramdisk for /tmp
> > and doing swap over NFS via /dev/loop instead of patching the kernel.  I
> > compiled my own LTSP kernel using the RH 7.3 i686/SMP config.
> 
> I second the statement made earlier about needing the NFS swap patch.
> Without the patch, if the kernel gets to the point where it has memory
> pressure and needs to swap out userland code, it will swap out the NFS
> userland parts and deadlock the kernel.  The NFS swap patch keeps this
> from happening and reserves some extra memory space (I think) for the

I haven't pushed the swap very hard, so I haven't run into this (yet). 
Thanks for the heads-up.


> NFS userland code.  From your previous post concerning the amount of
> memory, etc. you have on each workstation, It doesn't seem that you will
> need to swap.  Also, if you do need to swap, and this is taking place on
> a render farm, you will see drastic decreases in performance of you
> renders unless you are using extremely fast networks (i.e., gigabit
> ethernet or greater).

I agree, that _any_ kind of swapping on a renderfarm is bad, so we want
to make sure that we have enough memory for a "typical" render.  I set
up the swap as a fallback just in case we have an atypical jobs that
exceeds the real memory by a "little" bit, so that the job won't just
die.  In the extreme case, slow performance is better than no
performance.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp


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