render queue keeps freezing

[Hamid Rohi-bilverdy]

Your settings seems ok, I am not sure with the Open GL.

Have you tried render without displaying render preview?

Caps-lock on before hit the render button.

[Steve Modica]

You should look at what’s happening on the system during the run. iopending, activity monitor, and things like that. Memory, cpu and storage throughput are all interesting.

What usually happens is that things work great under “normal” loads, but when you really stress something (like using up all the memory), the system has to start paging, it slows way way down, and then all these interesting timing windows open up for bugs to appear. So you don’t want to run “production” runs on a system that’s not running in the sweet spot. Apple (and most vendors I’m sure) don’t go around regression testing in resource constrained circumstances. (they may do this to test specific elements like the paging code, but they aren’t running rendering tests like this)

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

Perhaps a better analogy:
You want to haul your 28′ boat with your VW. So you hook it up and discover that you can’t move it unless you put the car in first gear. So you start driving that way. You would clearly realize that you were over-revving the engine and stop. You might imagine the transmission was having trouble.
Computers don’t limit themselves. So they’ll use up all the memory, pile up the IO queue, max out the CPU etc. All these things are fine for those moments when some intense thing is running. However if you are a production guy (for example, running weather simulations), you don’t want to run like that. It’s not efficient and it tends to have problems during your 3 week simulation run.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Ed Purver]

Thanks for the replies, much appreciated!

Hamid, yeah, I have render preview disabled.

Steve, I’ve been looking at the Activity Monitor, and I can see the aeselflink processes running that AE starts up for each cpu. The percentage of cpu that they consume spikes every time that the render process moves on to the next item in the queue, and does that thing where it sits and thinks before rendering the frames. Sometimes it manages to move on to the next comp in the queue just fine. But when it doesn’t, this is exactly where it crashes. It creates the next file but fails to render any frames, leaving an incomplete .mov file of 0kb.

It just did it again, and I looked at the activity monitor while AE span uselessly in the background. Nothing seemed to look really strange, except that After Effects was now in red. But I don’t claim to really understand the activity monitor fully. I put some screenshots online, in case anyone has time to take a look and give me any feedback.

https://www.edpurver.com/ae_1.png
https://www.edpurver.com/ae_2.png
https://www.edpurver.com/ae_3.png

I really need to get this fixed, because overnight renders just stop and hang after a few comps and I’m losing hours of precious rendering time.

[Steve Modica]

That’s some really interesting output.
I’m not 100% sure how apple decides to turn something red. I think it means it’s not responding to interrupts.
The CPU time is all system time, which indicates it’s the kernel or system calls doing stuff.
What’s really interesting is all that “active” memory. That’s very unusual. Again, I can’t be sure what things apple chooses to put in that bucket, but I’m guessing it’s dirty cache data that has not flushed to disk. I would be interested to see what happened if you killed AE and let it sit. Does all that eventually turn blue (inactive?)
It’s almost like the IO is stopped and so it’s all just going into cache and sitting there

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Ed Purver]

Well, I wondered if my project had simply got too big, so I cut it down to what I only need now. However, last night it made it through several comps in the queue and then crashed completely – ie disappeared and made a crash report. I don’t have the knowledge to understand what this crash report is telling me, but I’ve posted it up online in case you or anyone else has a moment to take a look and tell me what it means.

It’s here:
https://www.edpurver.com/ae_crash.txt

thanks again for your help.

[Ed Purver]

Yeah, right, that is a lot of information! Thanks for your reply, Dave. Yes, all of the footage I am using is Animation codec – there is nothing else in terms of footage. However, yesterday I imported a new folder of approx 30 movies (all animation codec, ranging in size from 500mb to 2gb each. Now AE is having real trouble just scrolling through them in the project window. I get the mac OSX spinning beachball of death most of the time when I am trying to scroll down just to select an item with my mouse, and now it just totally crashed and disappeared when I was trying to do just that.

I don’t think that this is related to my initial render queue problem, but I’m also now wondering if there is a limit to the amount of footage that AE CS4 can handle referring to in one project?

Just in case anyone’s hungry for another ton of crash info, I posted the latest crash log, too:
https://www.edpurver.com/ae_crash02.txt