Irush

Job Progress

New in 102.42a9c. Progress bars can be enabled in irush for the "Jobs" and "All Jobs" report to show how far along a job is for rendering:



This feature can be enabled in Edit -> Preferences:



With progress bars enabled, its easy to compare Rush's Round-Robin Scheduling vs. FIFO Scheduling:

Round Robin scheduling.

FIFO scheduling.

Log Viewing

Irush now can view frame logs in a separate window or in an external text editor to do searches and editing. There's a one-button way to view the currently selected frame log(s) in a separate window:



Or, you can right-click on the frame log or the selected frame(s) to view the log in an external text editor:



You can set your favorite text editor to use in Edit -> Preferences -> Set Text Editor:



The default on Windows is "Wordpad", the default on Macs is "Text Editor", and the default on Linux is gvim.

Irush Themes

New in 102.42a9. Irush's screen colors can now be controlled via selectable 'themes'. Just go into Edit -> Preferences -> Themes to select various preset themes.


Irush themes new in 102.42a9

Advanced users can also create their own themes by either editing the rush/etc/.irush-themes file (affecting the global themes), or by copying this file to their home directory and making modifications that only affect their own login.

Irush Search Filter

New in 102.42a8. Irush now has a report 'Search Filter' in the upper right of the irush screen, that lets you type in search strings to limit large irush reports to only show matches of your search string. 'Regular Expressions' can also be used as well as variations on boolean 'NOT' and 'OR' for complex searches; see this short demo video showing how to use this new feature.


Irush 'search filter' new in 102.42a8

Irush Repeatable Hotkeys

In 102.42a7 (and up), the "Rep" key can now repeat pre-programmed hotkeys as well.

Just hit 'Rep', and now the 'Hotkeys' menu lights up in green, along with all the other buttons that are repeatable. You can then either hit on of your pre-programmed Hotkey function keys you want to repeat (F1, F2...), or one of the pre-programmed menu items under the "Hotkeys" menu.



Irush Title Bar

In 102.42a7 (and up), the irush 'title bar' now accurately shows the current job's title when you switch between jobs. When you either double click on a new job, or when you change the Jobid by hand, the irush job title will adjust itself automatically to show the new job's title as well. (Previously, the title bar would keep a fixed name, based on the title of the submitted job that opened the irush window)

Interactively Resizable Columns

In 102.42a5 (and up), irush now has the ability to interactively resize its columns, so that you can easily view reports that might have very wide columns, such as for wide job titles:





License Expiration Warnings

In 102.42a6, Irush now gives visual feedback when Rush eval and/or rental licenses are about to expire:




Job Edit Screen

The irush "Job Edit' screen has now been separated into separate tabs:



This also allows one to resize the width of the screen, to make fields wide enough so very long command lines can be viewed all at one time.


Text Selection from Log Windows

You can now mouse-select text from irush's log viewer normally, (instead of the old 'block text' selection that could only grab entire lines):



Before, you could only select entire lines from the logs, making it hard to copy/paste things like pathnames and substrings. Now you can select text normally.

Rush

Optimizations for Large Networks

Much attention is paid in 102.42 to address large networks with high volume rendering and large numbers of jobs/cpus.
Specific items follow..


Lower Memory Use on Unix Platforms via vfork(2)

Rush 102.42a6 introduces an optimization that lowers the rush daemon's impact on RAM on busy job servers with hundreds of jobs. Rushd now uses vfork() for executing external programs, so that large job servers don't hit memory as hard when fork/exec'ing executables such as jobdumpcommand's, etc. This prevents a rush daemon with a large memory footprint from hitting memory when eg. someone dumps a bunch of jobs hosted by a unix job server, causing lots of fork/execs of jobdumpcommands.


Faster Daemons

Rush 102.42 introduces a much faster internal database from 102.41. All of rush's scheduling messages now include indexing data that helps rush avoid 'linear database lookups' which made the previous rush daemons use a lot of cpu with large lists of jobs on a single server (>200).


Daemon protocol optimized to prevent large packets

Many of rush 102.42's error recovery protocol messages have been optimized to avoid creating large udp packets with large lists of jobs. In many cases packets that used to contain >1000 bytes have been shrunk to 20 bytes or so. Stress tests with many jobs submitted to single machines with large pools of cpus were used to make these optimizations.


'Rushtop' Uses Smaller Packets

102.42's 'rush -status' command (which rushtop uses to get its data) now has options (-usage, etc) to limit the data rushtop needs without having to gather up lists of jobs from each machine. This decreases the traffic rushtop creates on the network.

Rushtop Traffic Size Rushtop receives one of these packets from each machine on the network. Packets could get quite large, depending on how many jobs each host was serving.
Old Status Packets (102.41 and older)	New Status Packets (102.42 and up)
# rush -status h ontario d 0 RUSHD 102.42 PID=7197 Online 27 0 2 "" j erco ontario.1 - Done 11:12:00 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.2 - Done 10:47:40 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.3 - Done 10:47:40 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.4 - Done 10:47:40 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.9 - Done 10:47:39 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.10 - Done 10:47:39 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.11 - Done 10:47:39 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.12 - Done 03:38:51 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.13 - Done 03:38:51 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.14 - Done 03:38:01 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.15 - Done 03:38:01 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.16 - Done 03:38:01 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.17 - Done 03:38:01 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.18 - Done 03:38:01 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.19 - Done 03:38:01 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.20 - Done 03:38:01 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.21 - Done 03:38:00 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.22 - Done 03:37:47 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.23 - Done 03:37:47 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.24 - Done 03:37:47 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.25 - Done 03:37:46 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.26 - Done 03:37:46 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.27 - Done 03:37:46 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.28 - Done 03:37:46 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.29 - Done 03:37:46 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.30 - Done 03:37:46 100 0 0 "" j erco ontario.31 - Done 03:37:46 100 0 0 "" p - - - - - - - p - - - - - - - C 1 3 0 M 501 27 S 509 45 293 3873 4166	# rush -status -usage h ontario d 2 RUSHD 102.42 PID=7197 Online 27 0 2 "" C 1 2 0 M 501 27 S 509 45 0 32 32


License Warnings for Too Many Hosts

When too many hosts have been added to the rush/etc/hosts file than one is licensed for, rush now simply ignores the extra hosts. Warnings are printed in the rushd.log, and the 'rush -lah' report warns about the extra hostnames.

'List All Hosts' Report Enhanced (rush -lah) The 'rush -lah' report now warns of having more hosts in the rush/etc/hosts file than you're licensed for.

% rush -lah IP Hostname Ram Cpus MinPri Criteria 192.168.0.10 geneva 1024 2 0 +any,+w2k,+work 192.168.0.3 rotwang 100 2 0 +any,+erco,+linux,intel,dante 192.168.0.9 ontario 100 2 0 +any,+erco,+linux,intel,dante [..] 192.168.5.132 r0129 100 1 0 +any,+sgi 192.168.5.133 r0130 100 1 0 +any,+sgi *** ERROR: TOO MANY HOSTS IN RUSH HOSTS LIST [24 found, 20 max] *** ERROR: The following hosts are being ignored by rush.. *** 192.168.5.134 r0131 100 1 0 +any,+sgi *** 192.168.5.135 r0132 100 1 0 +any,+sgi *** 192.168.5.136 r0133 100 1 0 +any,+sgi *** 192.168.5.137 r0134 100 1 0 +any,+sgi

Rushadmin

'rushadmin' under Unix now ensures /usr/local/rush/bin is in the path

In 102.42a7, a fix was added to prevent the 'rush: command not found' error that would appear if 'rushadmin' was invoked from the Finder or Dock (OSX), or from the desktop or Konqueror (Linux).

'rushadmin' now makes it easy to change common items in rush.conf

Setting up mail servers, uid/gid conversion between unix and windows, and configuring administrative users is now easily accessed through rushadmin. Just pick the 'Rush Config' tab, make your changes (which are applied to the rush.conf file) then in the 'Edit' screen hit 'Send' to send your changes.

Rushtop

Rushtop now shows all machines not responding

Black and Yellow chevrons indicate machines that are down or haven't been responding for the last 30 seconds or so. The new Properties|Use Chevrons checkbox controls whether the black/yellow chevrons, or the older 'white hash lines' are used to show down machines:

Rushtop Chevrons indicate machines that are down. The white hashlines are useful
in that they show the previous state of the machine before it stopped responding.
The new chevrons blot out the cpu history, but they look a bit cooler.

Rushtop now has a new popup menu; just right click anywhere inside rushtop's window:

Rushtop Popup Menu.

The Rushtop help menu brings up online help, which gives a brief overview and description of rushtop's bars and colors:

There is also an "Update Speed" menu that lets you change the update speed for the cpu bars:

And finally, the "Properties" menu lets you control whether the bars animate with a "decay", and whether to use the new black+white chevrons:

Submit Scripts

All submit scripts now support your OS's native file browser

<New in Rush 102.42a8 (and up), all the submit script's main menu bars now have an 'Edit -> Preferences -> 'Use native file browser' preference setting which if enabled, causes all the submit scripts 'Browse' buttons to use your operating system's local file browser. The setting is remembered for all submit scripts.



When this flag is enabled, the file browser will look like the following, depending on your operating system:

Windows

Mac

Linux

Submit-Maya6 has new features and more detailed user docs

New in Rush 102.42a6, the submit-maya6 script (which works with Maya 7.x and 8.x as well) has been enhanced in several ways to support floating point frame rendering, stepped batch rendering, and several features of Maya rendering, including:

• Floating Point Rendering
• Maya Software Rendering
• MentalRay® For Maya Rendering
• MentalRay® Standalone Rendering
• RenderMan® Rendering

Click on the 'Help' button at the bottom of the submit-maya6 for detailed docs on how to use each of these features.


Mac Submit Scripts are no longer separate

This means when you copy the entire 'examples' directory to your file server, the .common.pl file will go with it.

Now you can just edit the single .common.pl file on your file server to make changes, without having to 'rush -push' it around the network. This also means you will be able to keep multiple versions of future submit scripts in separate directories, each with their own .common.pl scripts.

** If you want to use your old 102.41 submit scripts with the 102.42 release, you can. **
Old submit scripts should almost always be compatible with newer versions of rush. Your old submit scripts will still be expecting to use the old .common.pl file in the rush/etc directory, so just copy your old .common.pl file into rush/etc, and distribute it around as you used to do.


The submit script's 'help' text has been moved out of the code

The HTML help text for the submit scripts is now in a 'help' subdirectory of the submit scripts. This allows the code to be smaller, unencumbered with the help text. It also allows images to easily be included in the documentation.


Easier To Create New Fields In Submit Scripts

In 102.42, the new field layout settings in the new submit scripts make it easy to add new fields, and see the field layout which uses an 'ascii art' style for the internal layout. (Old 'input' commands can still be used, but the new graphic 'ascii art' format is easier to read and maintain)

New Submit GUI Layout Format These are the commands in the submit scripts that define the user prompts.
Old "input" format	New 'ascii art' format
xyinc 0 +10 inputstring "Ram:" "Ram" "" inputstring "Submit Host:" "SubmitHost" "" xyinc 0 +10 xysize 420 80 inputmultiline "Never Use Cpus:" "NeverCpus" "" inputmultiline "Submit Options:" "SubmitOptions" "" xyinc 0 +10 xysize 430 24 input { name "Job Start Command" dbname "JobStartCommand" labelsize 14 filebrowser yes filebrowserfilter "*" apphelp on textfont 4 # courier } input { name "Job Done Command" dbname "JobDoneCommand" labelsize 14 filebrowser yes filebrowserfilter "*" apphelp on textfont 4 # courier } input { name "Job Dump Command" dbname "JobDumpCommand" labelsize 14 filebrowser yes filebrowserfilter "*" apphelp on textfont 4 # courier } xyinc 0 +10 xysize 500 84 input { name "Never Use Cpus" dbname "NeverUseCpus" labelsize 14 multiline apphelp on textfont 4 # courier } [..]	Ram: ______________ ? Submit Hosts: __________________________________________________ ? Job Start Command: ___________________________________________ ? Browse Job Done Command: ___________________________________________ ? Browse Job Dump Command: ___________________________________________ ? Browse Never Use Cpus: __________________________________________________ ? __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ Submit Options: __________________________________________________ ? __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________