Re: Setting up a managed cluster, and qmaster problems

I don't know how! I just set up the managed cluster, made sure it works in compressor, and then set it up in FCServer. It just works. And fails. If you know what I mean.

I remember when I first started FCServer, I also tried a quickcluster. But I could not tell it which systems to use and which not, so it would grab all systems for the compression jobs. That turned out to be a problem when the systems were doing edit to tape. They would stutter and lose sync when asked to compress in the background... Besides that, it worked very much the same as managed clusters. When I created my first cluster, it just appeared as an option in FCServer. No problem.

Overall, the whole compressor-quemaster software group seems very unstable to me. When it works, it is very fast, but it bombs out in the middle of jobs and requires re-installation before it works again. Bad. Very bad.

Error handling is not good. If you submit a video compression job to a cluster it divides it among many render servers. If one of those servers freezes or it's compressord stops running, the complete job hangs, waiting for the system to keep on working. There is no timeout to re-submit that "stuck" segment to a working render server - at all. The whole job hangs, and so does all other jobs submitted after it. The only way around is to reboot the cluster controller and re-submit the job(s) from scratch. And the issue becomes much more complicated when FCServer resides on the same system, as in my case. At least you want to split the two. I don't have that luxury.

Sooo. We are in for a long, rocky ride. FCServer is only in version 1.1, and compressor also needs a lot of work.

Francois


Regards
Francois