Maxwell Render

Hi,

Hope someone can help.

When I'm doing a co-operative rendering, right at the end of the process when the manager is merging the files it crashes on me and I get a windows error message saying 'mxnetwork.exe has stopped working'.

I have also found that I continually get an error message in the render-nodes, that say’s, 'Error in mxi sending socket. The remote host closed the connection'.

This has been a problem since V2 came out, to get around it I merge the files manually which is a bit of a pain.

We’re running Maxwell on a standard PC network on Vista 64bit workstations, nothing special.

Also the file sizes of our images are generally quite large (we tend to render-out at around 3000 pixels wide) and they do use up a lot of memory; although each of our nodes has 16G of RAM so can handle it?

Any ideas?

sound familiar.. as much as i can tell, the merging process is done on the manager computer, and can take quite a bit of additional memory, than it used during the render.
i was running the manager on a computer which also rendered at its limit of ram and i'd get the same error you described when merging because no ram was left.. now i always take care that i have enough ram buffer to finish the render, or run the manager on a seperat x64 machine.

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workstation: EVGA SR-2 / dual x5650@3.5Ghz / quadro 4000

Thansk for the reply, yeah it also fails when I don't even use the manager workstation as a render node (i.e. it's only doing the manager work) each workstation has 16G of RAM, can't imagine it's using all the RAM just merging the files?

I've cracked it, it's Multilight! When you have it switched on the Manager crashes, when you have it switched off it doesn't?!

Must be a bug!

OK there's a bit more to it. It's not actually Multilight itself that's causing the problem.

I did some tests this time with a more simple scene; a box with some lights in.

I rendered out an image with Multilight on and another one with Multilight off at 1000pixels wide. They both worked fine so it isn't Multilight on it's own that’s causing the problem.

I then just stuck with the Multilight images and increased the resolution till I got to 5000pixels wide (it worked for 1500, 2000 and 3000) where the manager crashed like it has been doing consistently.

So the manager is crashing when it has to deal with extremely large files. It crashes no matter what combination you use in terms of manager and render node (still crashes if you use 1 workstation as a manager only) and I don’t have any shortage of RAM in my workstations so I don’t think it’s that?

Depending on the scene, using multilight at 5000 resolution could very well put you over your 16GB limit.

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Brian Looney
Maxwell + RealFlow
http://lunatic-studio.com/
Help! I'm dispersing into a haze of probability!

Well the 5000pixel was just a test to try and get it to crash. I was only rendering it for 4minutes and had task manager up, I wasn't using anywhere near 16G of memory so don’t think it’s that.

I have done some more testing.

It seems that when the final merged .mxi exceeds around 2G in size the manager crashes. I’ve had it working fine for .mxi’s under 2G, anything over that and the manager crashes?

This explains why when I switched Multi-light off on my original image it worked; the non Multi-light version was a smaller file size.

I work for a firm of Architects and we tend to render-out at large resolutions so this is becoming a bit of a nightmare, the only work-around I have is to manually merge the individual .mxi files, which works fine.

Hopefully someone from Next Limit will respond?

I'm having exactly the same issue, I've send a support question to next limit, and I will also point them to this topic and post the response here as soon as I get it. This is, according to me, a priority issue as we especially use network render on these large images, as we need them done in a reasonable amount of time. (that's why we bought the extra license!) So it should be able to cope!

Gigabyte network or 10/100?

Maybe the process of getting the files is so slow that the manager thinks it failed. For those file sizes the network should be Gigabyte and cables cat.6 for a fast transfer.

Just thinking aloud.

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http://www.ftella.com

you might want to keep an eye on the ram usage of your machine running the manager.. i also had/have some problems while merging large files..

viewtopic.php?f=72&t=33205

for critical scenes always copy the mix files from the nodes before stopping the job..

with something like this batch:



R/S/T representing mapped networkdrives/sharedfolders on nodes (windows)

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workstation: EVGA SR-2 / dual x5650@3.5Ghz / quadro 4000

Thaks for the tip of copying the Node files before stopping, we're going to try this. I'm also in contact with Next limit support.

We are using Gigabit network by the way.