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> Forum Home > Feature Requests > Worker - Engine Job Allocation

	Tue, 12/Apr/2016 9:21 AM
Mark 8 Posts	Hi! I write this bearing in mind that we are on 2015.2 and this might already be addressed in 2016... Would it be possible to modify the behaviour of worker allocation to engines, or have a switch to do so (like job allocation)? At the moment we have a "round-robin" option for jobs, but not for engines as far as I can tell. The reason I would like it is as follows: At the moment, if we use custom CPUs on a job, it picks the highest priority machine and fills it completely with work before moving on to another machine. This could be as many as 16 workers, depending on the settings we use and the processors available. It would be better (for us) if the workers could be allocated across qualifying engines, and then return to check if a high priority engine has capacity to take on another worker, etc. This way we don't have everything tanking one engine and leaving everything else idle. We get maximun use out of our licenses and hardware. Here is a situation that sometimes occurs: in a 300 frame render, say frames 20 to 50 are the heaviest. Smedge does the sample packets (fab! :-) then moves on to filling in the blanks from lowest to highest frames. However: when using custom CPUs, this can mean that all of the heaviest frames get allocated to one machine, and it is not necessarily the most powerful. It's almost certainly not the highest priority machine, because that was allocated the sample packets first. I understand that most users do not even touch the CPU settings, but I would certainly list it as a nice to have. ;-) Best Mark
	Thu, 14/Apr/2016 4:42 PM
Robin 1138 Posts	Hi Mark. The system does fill an engine before moving on to the next. The Engine priority is a help, but as you noted, if engines are busy, the one that is idle gets the work, no matter its priority. I will take a look at adding this for the next release. Thanks, -robin

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