DrQueue 0.64.2 RC3 review
DownloadDrQueue is an Open Source render farm managing software
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DrQueue is an Open Source render farm managing software. DrQueue distributes shell based tasks such as rendering images on a per frame basis.
DrQueue works under Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Mac OS X and Windows. It is distributed under GPL and is composed by three main tools: master, slave and drqman.
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The master acts as a server, where all tasks are stored and where computers running slaves report their success or failure executing the tasks.
The slaves run on every node of the render farm. They inform about their load average and if it is below some level (determined by the user) they are considered available for rendering. Then they take the first task asigned by the master server.
drqman is the GUI used to control jobs and computers. You can reprioritize jobs, stop them, restart specific frames, change frames to be rendered and so. drqman uses gtk as widget library.
Right now DrQueue supports Maya, Mental Ray, Blender, BMRT, Pixie and 3Delight under the GUI. The other tools need a small shell script to be written.
DrQueue has been tested in production environments and has proved to be a stable alternative to other comercial products with the advantage of being licensed under GPL.
Here are some key features of "DrQueue":
Job priorities.
Job dependencies.
Slave pools.
Limit maximum number of CPUs (general and on a single computer), per job and per computer.
Render single frames or blocks of frames.
Estimate job finish time (using average frame time).
Limit minimum memory of slaves where to render.
Limit depending on Operating System.
Script generator for: Maya, Mental Ray, Blender, Pixie and Bmrt.
Generic job type for any other renderer.
Mail notifications.
Command line tools for scripting.
Requeue counter (with reset).
Master continues jobs where left in case of death.
Production proof.
Log watch in real time.
Per frame actions (requeue,kill,skip).
Host block list for every jobs (also with command line tool).
GUI (drqman) supports all actions.
Computer hardware detection.
Supported OS: Linux, Mac OS X, Irix and FreeBSD.
Load average detection.
Load average limit.
Slave autoenable at specific times (per computer).
What's New in 0.64.1 Stable Release:
Many bugs were fixed, including several shared memory problems involving pools and custom environment variables, 32/64-bit CPU mixing, job script problems with maya.sg, and a Mac OS X proctype detection failure.
New API tools were included and some code cleanups were made.
Two new log levels were provided for extra verbosity along with a new logger function call and calls providing a new abstraction layer (or step towards it) that makes log directory paths and filenames platform independent.
What's New in 0.64.2 RC3 Development Release:
A nasty database bug was fixed.
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