A couple of small issues

[tigeriltis]

Having finished my first indigo project last night, here's a couple of technical issues I would like to share with y'all.

I used several computers to render the scene and linked some of them via an 8MBit internet connection others were on an 100MBit lan.
1. Issue: Having frame_upload_periods of about an hour repeatedly caused connection losses (even within the lan) and slaves were dropped.
So I reduced upload_periods to about 15 mins, which then worked fine. The network-links themselfs apeared to be stable. Sorry, I cant be more specific about this one.

For the final render I used a frame size of 3600x3000 px with double oversampling resulting in a render buffer of almost 500MB. This made it impractical to have 15mins upload_period over my 8MBit connection.´ Since I couldn't increase the upload_period (see 1.Issue), I decided to render on each computer with a different seeds and later on combine the render buffers. Which brings me to my
2. Issue: I wanted to combine two render buffers by starting a network master resuming from a buffer holding 600 samples per pixel, then I connected a network slave that resumed from a buffer holding 400 other samples per pixel. No matter what I tried, the master process keept crashing right after having received the client buffer. At this point it had consumed about 1GB of RAM while another 1.5GB were available. So memory should not be an issue. The error message was something about abnormal programm termination.

During my experiments I had to restart the network master process several times. I wanted the master to assign different seeds to the connecting slave threads. However,
3. Issue: I wonder, is it a bug or a feature that the -seed command line parameter does not effect the seeds assigned to slave threads. After restarting the network master, starts over with assigning 1000 to the first process joining, then continues with 2000 and so on. I tried the seed command for the master and the slaves, no effect in any way. I even tried if the position of the seed parameter in the command line has an influence .

Besides above difficulties, I have come to love indigo .

In case anybody is interested, said render is available at
http://tigeriltis.deviantart.com/art/Jazz-90416460
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[daniel_nieto]

i think ono's the only one who can understand why this is happening...