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I'm having trouble getting my Mac to render for more than a few hours.

I'll start a render before I go to bed, come back 8-10 hours later and find that it has only rendered for 1hr 30 mins or so. As soon as I wake it up it carries on rendering but I can't figure out why it is sleeping when the processor should be working full time.

I am using a new iMac 27", 2.93Ghz i7. 12gb of RAM. I also added an SSD aftermarket (An OWC drive that I use for the system and applications) Initially I thought it was because when writing the MXI and Output to the default location (on the SSD) there was no hard drive spinning up to keep the computer awake. But I have changed the output location to the HD now and this doesn't make a difference.

Any tips/suggestions would be appreciated.

mahoosive,

I assume you have set your energy saver settings in System Preferences to "Never" on both slider bars. If that doesn't fix it I haven't any idea of what could be pausing the renderings.

tcamco,

Thanks for your reply. You are right, in that if I set the the sliders to never then the problem goes away. But I shouldn't have to do that. When I'm rendering in Modo, OS X is intelligent enough to realise the computer is doing something and doesn't sleep the computer. Once the render has finished, the time set on the slider starts and then the computer sleeps accordingly. This is surely how it should work with Maxwell too. If my render only takes 2 hours I don't want to force my computer to stay awake all night, or possibly all weekend.

Hi mahoosive,

We are not explicitly avoiding sleeping during rendering, but the standard way of avoiding automatic sleeping is keeping sleep times above time for file saving (Maxwell usually saves mxi files every 12 minutes, it can be changed in preferences).

Explicit sleep avoiding could be implemented if users ask for it.

Best regards,

nachob

hello

i've had this problem before and I now set the energy saver to 'never' - I would prefer that maxwell would render and then let the system sleep after it has finished

thanks
D

Thanks nachob,

I have the mxi save file set to 10 mins, and my sleep settings set to 30 mins. It still sleeps. For now I will change the energy saving settings to 'never' before I do an overnight render but would love it if you could make this automatic in future updates.

Kind regards,

Ok, we are adding support to automatically avoid idle sleeping while Maxwell is rendering.

It should be supported in the next update of Maxwell.

Best regards,

nachob

I think that the app Pleasesleep can be set to prevent sleep when a certain program is running. You could try that out and see if it helps...

Claus