Hqueue network render with low priority on workstations

[dimovfx]

Hi guys! I am new to houdini and odforce community so please excuse me in advance for any mistakes I make

 

So, recently I needed to do some rendering with mantra in a small office with only 5-6 workstations and no dedicated render farm. The problem was, that it was impossible to work and render on the same workstation, so I had to do some research and found that on windows system, it was not possible to lower priority of render jobs that hqueue sends over the network, or at least not easy. So I found that library (psutil) for python, that have some nice functions that normally python could't do.

 

Here is what you need:

 

psutil-2.1.3-py2.7-win64-vc9.rar - for houdini vc9

psutil-2.1.3-py2.7-win64-vc11.rar - for houdini vc11 (this was compiled with vc11 because normally python is vc9)

 

now you have to extract the corresponding archive folder to where you have set houdini in the network. for example:

 

\\server\projects\houdini_distros\hfs.windows-x86_64\python27\lib

 

next we need to edit hqlib.py file, you can find it here for example:

 

\\server\projects\houdini_distros\hfs.windows-x86_64\houdini\scripts\hqueue\hqlib.py

 

and at the beginning of the file, just under the last "import..." line, we add this:

import psutil
proc = psutil.Process(os.getpid())
proc.set_nice(psutil.IDLE_PRIORITY_CLASS)

Please try it for yourself and give me feedback or if you need help with something. 

 

Cheers,

Alexander.

 

P.S. also there is a way if you want to set it per workstation, so if you need help let me know.

[lukeiamyourfather]

I've modified things with HQueue similarly on OS X and Linux which just requires adding a "nice -n 19" in front of the command. Too bad Windows doesn't have "nice" command. Thanks for sharing this!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_%28Unix%29