Put back job stealing as an option!

[wayneheim]

With the 7.2 update of the network rendering Keyshot no longer supports "job stealing". I don't do animations. I'm an illustrator and have a render farm set up to kick out my renders as fast as possible. Like most people, not all of my render boxes are the same speed. In the past if the fastest one finished it would steal work from a slower box. Not any more. The way the job is divided up is the way it will process on each box. So you have raw horsepower sitting there that you can't utilize.  I'm sure I'm not the only one that is experiencing slower render times now because of this. With this setup all your hardware would have to match to be efficient. Very expensive.

Since the code already exists, sure would be nice to have a switch put into the network rendering so that you can switch modes!!  Pretty please!

Anybody else feeling my pain?

Wayne

[Morten Kristensen]

Hello Wayne,

Sorry for the slow reply. First off, I recommend upgrading to the latest NR.

We removed this feature due to the fact that we now support working on tasks from multiple jobs at the same time. Before, it could only work on one job at a time, which is why the job stealing feature was introduced to get that single job done as fast as possible.

The tasks are completed as fast as possible.

The way this works, by way of an example, is that if you have two jobs with, say, 10 rendering tasks each and 2 connected slaves. They each get tasks from "the top" of the queue each time. When all the first 10 tasks have been dispatched (and not necessarily completed yet), it will automatically start giving tasks of the second job to any ready slaves.

I hope this illuminates why we don't have the job stealing feature anymore.
Thanks!

[bharris]

That makes a lot of sense overall. It would be nice to have the option to toggle between the two modes (either universally or per job).

[wayneheim]

Yes it sure would be nice to have a toggle option to choose. Not everyone sends multiple jobs to the queue at that same time. Some times total speed is the most important need. Please reconsider adding an option.

Wayne