Author Topic: Maya 2013 - only running on one core  (Read 4034 times)

jbrandibas

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Maya 2013 - only running on one core
« on: September 13, 2012, 09:06:03 PM »
I am having an issue where jobs submitted on Qube 6.3.4 utilizing the Maya jobtype are only running on one core on the worker machines.  Interactively the frame renders in 5 minutes and utilizes all the cores, but when submitted to qube, the job runs on one core and takes 20 minutes.

I am running Maya 2013 across the board.  This used to be a problem back in the 5.x days but it was resolved.  We just upgraded to 6.3.4 and the problem has resurfaced.  Is there something I can change to fix it?

BrianK

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Re: Maya 2013 - only running on one core
« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2012, 09:50:00 PM »
When submitting any job that will perform a render that allows thread control, you must tell the renderer how many threads to use & you must inform Qube how many threads the renderer will be using.

To tell the renderer how many threads to use, be sure "Expert mode" is turned on (at the bottom center of the submission dialog), then scroll down to the "Render Threads" field.  Give it an appropriate number of threads. (see screenshot)


To tell Qube how many threads the renderer will be using, with expert mode on, scroll down the "Reservations" field, click "Browse" and set the host.processors setting to the same number that you set for threads. (see screenshot)


Doing so will tell Qube to reserve X cores on a machine for this render & tell the renderer to use X threads when it renders.  If you were to submit a job with threads=8 and host.processors=8 to a machine with 24 cores, you could have three instances of this job rendering at the same time on that one machine (8*3=24).

To make life easier, for the Maya jobtype jobs, if you leave the "Render Threads" setting at '-1', you only need to set the host.processors value.  Qube will make the Render Threads match host.processors in this case.

So that all of your artists don't need to know this, open an empty Maya submission dialog from the Qube submit menu, set the Render Threads and host.processors values, click the "Set Defaults" button at the bottom-left of the submission dialog, then cancel out of the dialog.  Now you've saved those values for every subsequent Maya submission.  Be sure to File > Save Preferences to write those changes to disk & you'll then have those settings for jobs submitted from our in-app submission in Maya as well.

You can make those defaults persist across an entire facility with Studio-wide preferences.  See the User Guide under the help menu in Qube or via our online docs for more information: http://pipelinefx.com/docs/

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« Last Edit: September 13, 2012, 09:51:43 PM by BrianK »