Is this possible?
I'm running a continuous build process that generates several hundred render jobs with 100 to 1500 frames each. There's 30 servers in the farm, but as the frames take between 3 and 5 seconds to render it's a bit wasteful having the 40-50 sec overhead of sending a job to a new server x 30 machines when each of them may only spend 30 or 40 seconds actually rendering.
I know I can assign specific servers to a job at submit time, but I can't predict whether a group of servers will be free by the time the job they're assigned to arrives at the front of the queue.
The backburner monitor has an option to set a limit on the number of servers each job can have and I'd like to be able to set that value from MXS but I can't find any reference to it in the docs or in the showInterface of a job.
I’d like to be able to do something like…
job.setServerLimit (job.numFrames / 50)
Cheers,
Drea
It my not be that easy to do what you want.
A lot the information is ready-only for jobs once they go in. My recommendation would be to assign jobs to specific groups. Remember that machines assigned to specific Groups will start on the first job they are assigned to in the queue list. So if there are 100 jobs in queue and machine X will start on the first job it is assigned to even if it is 99 from the top.
On that note there is a python script posted to this forum that uses telnet to give you a little more control to backburner than you can get through maxscript itself. I haven’t personally used it, but from what I read it may give you the control you need, if you really need it.
-Eric
Hey pixel! I just moved to dallas a few months ago. Sup?
Not much, I need to find some time to come over to the studio and visit you and Will.
Glad to hear that works for you.
I’m sure there’s some fundamental law of nature being broken here.
LOL.
-Eric
Thanks Eric, this is exactly what I needed.
I knew that I’d be able to modify the job xml file if I could archive the job, but there seems to be no way to do that. The telnet via Python thing has let me do it really easily.
It does seem that Backburner 2008.1 has changed the format of the strings that telnet gets, so the original code doesn’t quite work any more.
This has made my whole system a bit bizarre now, because Max was already being driven from Python, and now Max calls Python. I’m sure there’s some fundamental law of nature being broken here.
Cheers,
Drea
Yeah, Will told me how you two knew each other; small world, huh?
Then again this is VFX in Dallas I suppose…