I’m using six machines to distribute Lightmass rendering with Swarm. It seems like four or five of the machines will finish their work very quickly while one or two will take a significantly longer time to complete their work. How is the work distributed? By lightmap, by material, by level? Is there a way to monitor and diagnose this kind of thing like a log showing what machine did what work? I’m trying to figure out how to distribute the work more evenly so the work gets completed faster. Thank you!
Nobody? No method exists to see what machine did what lightmap or how long each took?
I have tried in the past to get lightmass to work in a distributed way but unfortunately failed. From what I remember you can monitor which of the clients are doing what by clicking the swarm agent icon in the notification area. This should bring up a UI showing you what that client is currently doing.
The swarm coordinator itself might actually show you which clients are doing what as well. I know it tells you which who the client is doing a job for, but I can’t remember how much detail it gives you about exactly what it’s doing for them. I never actually got it working. The jobs never seemed to be distributed and each machine looked like it was just doing it’s own stuff and not giving any of the clients any jobs to do.
Thank you for replying. I found the Swarm Coordinator which shows what machines are online and who they’re working for but no detailed information about the jobs they’re doing that I could find.
The Swarm Agent shows blue bars which I assume represent individual maps but it doesn’t say what the map actually is or how long each map took, just a big overview of “is it done yet” without much detail. Compare that to queue managers for other software that have much more detailed information that helps to troubleshoot bottlenecks and other issues. For example there are a few maps that take significantly longer than the rest but I have no way of determining what those maps actually are, I’ll just guess and tweak with trial and error to find which maps are taking longer.
What I’m discovering is that this information doesn’t exist in the software in a user accessible way. Coming from a visual effects background and working with various renderers it’s pretty frustrating working with Lightmass and Swarm Agent. Like they’re an afterthought in the development process.
Hi -
On the machine that started the Swarm Process, you should be able to open the Swarm Agent (the small S in the Windows Taskbar) and go to the Log Tab and see what and how the information is distributed to other computers via the Swarm Coordinator.
I should also note that until the upcoming 4.8 release, there was a bug which kept the computer that was running Coordinator from seeing itself as an Agent. This has been fixed in 4.8 release.
Thank You
Eric Ketchum