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How to use 8 Cores in Compressor?

orbitalpunk

orbitalpunk

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 14, 2006
567
349
Could anyone possibly explain how to use 4-8 cores on a mac pro in compressor 3? from what i understand i need to turn on qmaster in the pref pane and turn on sharing.

these are my settings so far. after this i tried submitting a new export in compressor with the check box checked but it just hangs there afterwards. is there a step im missing?

Thanks so much

23mp5d


2xuj5e
 
Hey There,

Try one of these:

Under Cluster Select: op's Computer Cluster

or

Select "Include Unmanaged Services on Other Computers.

Let Us Know.

Tracer
 
hi there,

well in my screen "shotSelect "Include Unmanaged Services on Other Computers" was already selected.

and when i click on cluster, "this computer" is the only choice.
 
I asked Rob @ Barefeats as to what he did and here is what he said:

First, go to System Preferences.
Choose Apple Qmaster
Stop Sharing if it's on.
Set to Quick Cluster with Services
Select "Distributed processing for Compressor"
Click on Options for Selected Service. You can choose from 1 to 8 instances, depending on the number of cores you have.
Give your Quick Cluster a name like "op's Local Cluster."
Once you have the options set, click Start Sharing, and close the preferences.

Then when you launch Compressor, define the file to render and the render quality, and SUBMIT the job for render.
At that time you can choose the Cluster: "This Computer" (no clustering) or "op's Local Cluster" (virtual clustering using one core per instance).
Once the job starts, you can monitor things with Activity Monitor. You will see Compressor spawning one process for each instance you defined.

Thanks Rob

Tracer
 
Option grayed out

I'm running a Mac Pro Octo 3.0GHz with 9GB of RAM. Qmaster 2, Compressor 2.

I'm following the above instructions to set up qmaster to utilize all 8 cores effectively, however in the qmaster pref view, the "Options for selected service" for compressor is grayed out (with 1 instance).

The Rendering service allows me to select 'Options for selected service", which shows 8 instances of 'This Computer', but compressor does not.

Am I missing something? I apologize in advance if this is answered elsewhere, but I truly have searched for the better part of an hour attempting to resolve this. I'd love to get compressor using 100% of all 8 cores!

-Chris
 

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cbentley said:
I'm running a Mac Pro Octo 3.0GHz with 9GB of RAM. Qmaster 2, Compressor 2.

I'm following the above instructions to set up qmaster to utilize all 8 cores effectively, however in the qmaster pref view, the "Options for selected service" for compressor is grayed out (with 1 instance).

The Rendering service allows me to select 'Options for selected service", which shows 8 instances of 'This Computer', but compressor does not.

Am I missing something? I apologize in advance if this is answered elsewhere, but I truly have searched for the better part of an hour attempting to resolve this. I'd love to get compressor using 100% of all 8 cores!

-Chris
Click to expand...

I think you're missing FCS 2 on a machine like that :D
 
I have the same issue! I set up Qmaster (FCS 2 & Tiger, all latest updates) just as described on a 8 Core Mac Pro and the only option that shows up in Compressor is "This Computer". I have reset Qmaster, deleted preferences, repaired permissions, etc a dozen times. Nothing can make this work. It did at one time, for a short time, off and on, but now I cannot get it to work. When it did, it is much faster and I would love to get it working again without having to wipe my drive and reinstall everything.
 
You have to uncheck Share and check Managed and then the long
button with "Options to select service..." is now clickable. Then you
click it and select the number of instances (which coincides with the
number of cores of your machine), I'm using 6.
 

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4God said:
You have to uncheck Share and check Managed and then the long
button with "Options to select service..." is now clickable. Then you
click it and select the number of instances (which coincides with the
number of cores of your machine), I'm using 6.
Click to expand...

That's so weird. Everything I've seen online has said to have them checked as "Shared". I'll give it a try when I get off from work. I plan to use 4 instances since each one can use two cores (from what I've read).
 
bigbossbmb said:
That's so weird. Everything I've seen online has said to have them checked as "Shared". I'll give it a try when I get off from work. I plan to use 4 instances since each one can use two cores (from what I've read).
Click to expand...

My bad, you're right, you need to have share checked. I just got mine working but the cores are only at 10%-40% most of the time. Once in a while they ramp up to 92%. I can't seem to get it to work right either.
 
A reboot seems to have fixed it for me. But it´s acting pretty weird:

When I encode, the Activity monitor doesn´t show any activity at all! 98% of the CPU inactive. Scary. And I have a bunch of "CompressorTranscoderX" tasks that show up red. Weird.

Encoding also doesn´t seem to be particularly fast.
 
cbentley said:
I'm running a Mac Pro Octo 3.0GHz with 9GB of RAM. Qmaster 2, Compressor 2.

I'm following the above instructions to set up qmaster to utilize all 8 cores effectively, however in the qmaster pref view, the "Options for selected service" for compressor is grayed out (with 1 instance).

The Rendering service allows me to select 'Options for selected service", which shows 8 instances of 'This Computer', but compressor does not.

Am I missing something? I apologize in advance if this is answered elsewhere, but I truly have searched for the better part of an hour attempting to resolve this. I'd love to get compressor using 100% of all 8 cores!

-Chris
Click to expand...

exact same issue here, running compressor 2 and i can't get the "options for selected service" button to become un-grayed... any help would be appreciated!
 
for people having problems changing instances using compressor 2:

ok i just found a thread saying they used terminal to manually change the preferences for qmaster.
i am basically clueless when it comes to command line prompt, but typing in "qmasterprefs" lists all the commands available, so i think i pieced together what you need to do.

first enter in: qmasterprefs -list
this will list the current settings, note the "instances 1" that pops up after the compressor line.

next enter: qmasterprefs -service "Compressor Processing" off instances 4 autorestart off unmanaged on
this i assume changes the instances to 4 (i heard 4 was best for octacore machines)

now enter qmasterprefs -list again to list the settings. they should be updated to show 4 instances now. and on my system, even the qmaster preference pane in system prefs now lists the instances for compressor as 4.

maybe someone with a bit more knowledge of this can confirm this all is correct. (although i am pretty sure it is, since there are now 4 nodes listed under the single computer in apple qadministor)
 
ok so i was experimenting with trying to change the number of instances to see which yielded the best performance... which ended up causing qmaster to not even work (after going up to 8 and then back down to 4). i got the "qmasterd not running" error message. anyway i uninstalled qmaster, compressor and motion, and then reinstalled them (plus updates) and it works again (on one instance) but for some reason now i have all of these "unmanaged services" showing up under my computer name in qadministrator (they're grayed out though). i assume they refer to instances that were created when i enabled multiple ones in qmasterprefs. either way, i don't think am going to meddle anymore.
 
The process originally stated by Tracer worked out well, I was able to peg all 8 processors... but I have a droplet that as a few different output formats, and it started working on them all at the same time (which is good), but after it finished one job, it went to using only about 50% for the remaining jobs... any ideas?

I'm not really complaining, it now only takes my 9:33 to render what used to take 2 hours... not bad.
 
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