Should a server be unresponsive , please notify me by clicking the Report button at the bottom of the page below. If you wish to leave a note (letting me know which server etc) you may do so but it is optional. Note it is public, so don't post any sensitive or inflammatory information!
We now have a 5G backup service - just change all instances of irayrenderserver.com (or .ddns.net) to irayrenderseverbackup.ddns.net. It will naturally be a lot slower, so I would ask unless it's critical during this period, to wait until normal service resumes.
If it's a regular issue, and just needs a reboot don't worry about explaining. Just click Report and then kick back and wait please. If issues are reported between 21.00 and 6.00 it will most likely be resolved as soon as I'm awake and checking my email, so please be patient during out of office hours.
If you look below and see an issue reported but is waiting on an action, please feel free to try the other server, while you wait for me to reboot it, or hit report again to add another notification. If it's out of hours, please consider I am not at the desk to sort.
Anything else please feel free to email me directly.
All times are in GMT
Iray Render Server is a black box. You can't adjust anything very much - so there's a lot of scripting and workarounds I use to try and overcome these issues in an automated way. It sadly does not support HTTPS - the server itself starts a web interface which you connect too, and I haven't been able to hack a way to get it to support this. But given it's not really handling anything super critical, it's less of an issue.
Server Cache
The Iray server software is a fickle beast and it's easy to get into a situation where the server is loaded up and the cache file hits 100gb+ in size and it just grinds to a halt, with no other option than to delete the cache (and subsequent jobs in the queue) and start over.
To mitigate this, I have a monitor which will clear the cache automatically once it's over a certain size as long as the server is idle and nothing is being uploaded to it. If it's busy, the server can in theory keep going until it reaches critical mass, but largely there's enough of a gap between users to allow this to happen.
If you see the server drop out, it will more the likely come back up after 30-60 seconds as part of this automatic cache clear, so I would give it moment to just make sure it's that before assuming that it's offline in a bad way. If it's offline for more than 5 minutes, then yes, assume something is up and give me a shout.
Dropping to CPU
This is a by-product of Iray I believe, where it will randomly just drop to CPU rendering even if the job fits in the VRAM after a few consecutive jobs have been run.
To mitigate this, I have another monitor which checks the CPU usage consistently and will reboot the server if it sees an extended period where the usage is over ~98%. Again, it will only do that if the server is not having anything uploaded to it.
One side-effect of this however is that if you have a job that is genuinely too big to fit into VRAM, it will cause the server to continually loop - if you see this happening please let me know and I can remove that job from the server. This is why I ask people to be mindful of the queue, what's on it and to just monitor their own jobs progress please.