[hatts]

Hello, first time poster here, long time Maxwell fan.

Just wondering if there's a way to cancel a preview request from within Monitor?
Hit Preview and realized it wasn't necessary, now I'm sitting here waiting for a several-GB .mxi to make it's way over to the host computer for a preview I don't really care about.

[Bubbaloo]

I think the only way to cancel it is to stop the render completely. But I would just let it go if the rendering is not finished and is a high priority. The preview won't take up much (if any) of your rendering resources. Only network bandwidth.

[hatts]

Thanks for the response Brian. So just to confirm; a particular node's MXI and/or preview export process is relatively light on resource load?

I ask because I have a follow-up question. Say I have 2 jobs in my queue. Job 1 has just finished, and nodes are merging their final MXI output to a network path. During this export, do they move on to Job 2 with relatively full resources available? In other words, I'm hoping relatively few resources get dedicated to Job 1's simple export action, and that Job 2 starts full-speed-ahead.

Thanks!

[Mihai]

This would depend mostly on the speed of your network actually. Imagine if you have 5 nodes and each one has been rendering something huge and each MXI file is a few gigs in size. Multiply that by the number of nodes and that data has to be transferred to the computer running the Manager. During this time, job 2 may start but it has to send the files to the nodes and the network is already loaded with sending those huge MXI. But once they have been sent to the Manager computer, they will be merged there by mximerge.exe which uses the CPU ofcourse but only on this computer, so the rest of the nodes can work at full speed as long as they have received all the files and can start rendering.

[hatts]

Good to know, thanks. Fortunately my manager computer is beastly.
The only remaining problem, then, with the lack of a "cancel preview" function, is that if I stop a job (via the method of lowering the SL) then the node will continue to send its preview and will ALSO proceed to send its finished mxi. I assumed it would know to cancel the preview, but no, it carried out the sending of both. In my case they were both 10gb mxi files...