Swarm - How to Limit CPU Usage

[blueskydesigngroup]

In our studio, we are happy for people who are rendering to utilise the power of other people's machines while they are in use.

However, let's say I want to allow my colleague to use my machine's power while I am still using it - at 100% CPU usage it makes my machine challenging to use, obviously.

Is there a way within the swarm settings to set a max CPU usage for a specific machine? The set affinity option in windows task manager works but does not stay put.

[ivan.slavchev]

Is there a way within the swarm settings to set a max CPU usage for a specific machine? The set affinity option in windows task manager works but does not stay put.

That's because you set affinity to the SWARM process, but the rendering is done by V-Ray that SWARM starts and it has a different PID on each start.

You can limit the number of threads to the CPU cores you'd like to be available for rendering - https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...guration-V-Ray

[blueskydesigngroup]

Brilliant that's exactly what I needed. Thanks Ivan.
(Shame it's a little hidden!)

[digiformer]

isnt there a quicker way for setting affinity on demand? I mean that is a lot of clicking for turning two cores off. And i have to turn off and on the swarm, too.
Would it somehow be possible to run the vray.exe with user previliges, so we i.e. could simply check the checkboxes in process explorer -as it was all the years before?

thank you for helping
Regards

[ivan.slavchev]

You can set "VRAY_NUM_THREADS=Number of cores you want to leave for rendering" variable on system level or per user to apply the settings globally. You can also apply the settings to 1 machine and then just copy its configuration to the others in SWARM - see the last article here - https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...orking-Network