102.42 Feature Highlights
Includes 102.42a9c Update Features
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.
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FIFO scheduling.
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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.
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.
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Old Status Packets
(102.41 and older)
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New Status Packets
(102.42 and up)
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# 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
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# 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
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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.
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% 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
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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:
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:
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Windows
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Mac
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Linux
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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.
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Old "input" format
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New 'ascii art' format
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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
}
[..]
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Ram: ______________ ?
Submit Hosts: __________________________________________________ ?
Job Start Command: ___________________________________________ ? Browse
Job Done Command: ___________________________________________ ? Browse
Job Dump Command: ___________________________________________ ? Browse
Never Use Cpus: __________________________________________________ ?
__________________________________________________
__________________________________________________
Submit Options: __________________________________________________ ?
__________________________________________________
__________________________________________________
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102.42 fixed various copy/paste bugs have been fixed in the GUI toolkit
The old release of the rush GUIs had problems with copy/paste on
some platforms. This apparently has been resolved by the maintainers
of the GUI toolkit that rush uses. For instance, sometimes you
couldn't select text from error dialogs and paste them into email,
or sometimes you couldn't paste messages from irush.
102.42 Standardized mail delivery of job info across all platforms
Rush used to use sendmail under unix, and it's own 'rushsendmail'
program under windows.
Sendmail has gotten harder to configure, so Rush now standardized
on using it's own built-in 'rushsendmail' to deliver emails, which
only needs to know the name of your mail server, and who you want
the messages to appear from. These settings can be released to the
entire network, regardless of what mixture of platforms you're using.
You can still configure Rush to use Sendmail (or other MTA's),
but the new built-in is now the default.
rush 102.42a6 features 06/12/06.
