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Cloud services run by monkeys?


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Has anyone actually managed to obtain a finished render of, say, an A1 sheet of elevations set to custom Renderworks, all options High Quality and 300 dpi?

All I keep getting is an email telling me it failed to process my file and I should "rest assured an experienced team of winged monkeys has been dispatched to fix the problem", along with a link to bunch of reasons why it might of failed but not the reason why mine did fail:

http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/997/Cloud+Job+File+Failure

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The file I was testing with only had one sheet of elevations and some plans. And the elevations only took an hour or so to render on an iMac.

I was thinking maybe the servers were being hammered after the Europe release, but it's not like a webpage... they have a queuing system.

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Christiaan

I've seen that in the US, too.

It feels like a 1.0 release and they are stomping on bugs as they find them.

I don't know this for sure, but - from my experience with it - it appears that there have already been one or two updates. I'm getting the monkeys message less often now than I did when it launched.

I've been wondering about dpi as well. I haven't tried Nomad on a original iPad or iPad2, but the render time on an iPad "3" is very long with dpi set at 150. Perhaps it was tested on the earlier machines and the slow draw time is because of the quadrupling of the number of pixels.

mk

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Guest Donne Martin

Hi Christiaan,

Our monkeys are sifting through server logs and crash reports to investigate what caused your jobs to fail. It would be very helpful if you could send me one or two sample files (dmartin@vectorworks.net).

Just a quick note, our systems are reporting a ~95% success rate with all jobs so far, slightly less after your files hit our servers :)

As michaelk mentioned we are actively monitoring the system and fixing bugs as they come up. I'll let you know what we find out about your jobs.

Regards,

Donne

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michael,

The Nomad application on the iPad doesn't "render" anything in the file itself. It is just a PDF viewer. Large PDFs, with sheets that have large, complex, or high res renderings take a little while longer for the viewer to cache to the screen. Once there, they should become a little more responsive in panning and zooming. Not fluid, but better.

You have to accept that the iPad has a limited amount of RAM and VRAM, two things that have a direct affect on the "speed" of viewing large PDFs. The same file on a desktop or laptop will be more responsive.

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You have to accept that the iPad has a limited amount of RAM and VRAM, two things that have a direct affect on the "speed" of viewing large PDFs. The same file on a desktop or laptop will be more responsive.

...wouldn't it be better as UX designers to accept that the iPad isn't designed for such large PDFs and use a different method for displaying such sheets on an iPad?

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I would tend to agree with Christian. I used Vectorworks Cloud Services for a few days before I went back to my old workflow. My previous workflow used iBooks as my viewer for self generated PDF files. It never has trouble with my PDF files.

The PDF generator on Vectorworks Cloud Services is actually custom. It doesn't generate identical PDFs to Vectorworks (different bookmarking is one anomaly). Perhaps it could be made to "flatten" the PDFs or optimize them in some way. This has long been a wish list item for the desktop version of Vectorworks.

Kevin

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Guest Donne Martin

Hi Michael,

When Nomad opens a file there are two steps:

1) If the file is not cached on the device, it will first download the file. We've seen some files upwards of 20 MB depending on quality settings and DPI--these could take awhile to load over wifi or 3G. Note after the file is downloaded, Nomad caches this file for offline support.

2) Once the file has been downloaded to the device, it is then opened and rendered/displayed. A good test of performance is to try the same file on iBooks and compare the speed. Although our tests indicate performance is similar for both applications, we are continually working to improve the app. If you find a considerable difference between Nomad and iBooks, please send us the file to investigate.

Thanks

Donne

dmartin@vectorworks.net

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Guest Donne Martin

Hi Kevin,

Could you send me the PDF files you see a speed difference in Nomad vs iBook? As I mentioned in the post above our tests indicate similar performance based on our set of benchmark files. We'd love to see where we can improve and your files could be very helpful.

>It doesn't generate identical PDFs to Vectorworks (different bookmarking is one anomaly)

I don't believe we've encountered this situation. A test file would be very helpful in tracking this down.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards

Donne

dmartin@vectorworks.net

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Guest Donne Martin

Hi Christiaan,

We have discovered the failing jobs are from out of memory errors during PDF export while rendering viewports, both on our cloud machines and on our in-house QA machines.

>A1 sheet of elevations set to custom Renderworks, all options High Quality and 300 dpi

>iMac 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7?12 GB RAM?2GB AMD Radeon HD 6970M

To help keep everyone in the loop:

Based on our off-list discussions you mentioned you are able to run a full export on your [beastly!] machine but occasionally receive out of memory errors and crashes on save. We have been unsuccessful on both our cloud and on our in-house QA machines thus far.

Vectorworks in the cloud is currently 32-bit like its desktop counterpart, so if the file cannot be processed locally due to out of memory issues, the cloud will see the same result.

To answer your off-list question, our machines on the cloud are Windows-based, as Apple does not allow licensing for cloud-based Mac machines. However, we have a mix of 50/50 Win and Mac computers in-house that we use for testing and development.

QA will be attempting DPI?s of less than 300 and different 3D conversion resolutions to see if either of these settings would allow your files to be processed. We are considering an option to send jobs to the cloud as either "printing quality" (300 DPI) or "viewing quality" (less than 300 DPI). For the latter we are trying to determine an appropriate DPI threshold as 300 seems overkill for mobile viewing.

We?ll run some additional tests to see where we can improve. Thanks for the feedback!

Regards,

Donne

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Guest Donne Martin

Kevin,

Thanks for your input, we've confirmed there is a difference in the way PDF files are exported on the Mac versus on Windows, we'll look into a fix.

Christiaan,

>I'm guessing v2013 has something to say about that?

Nice try :)

Regards,

Donne

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  • 1 month later...
Based on our off-list discussions you mentioned you are able to run a full export on your [beastly!] machine but occasionally receive out of memory errors and crashes on save. We have been unsuccessful on both our cloud and on our in-house QA machines thus far.

Donne, has there been any progress on this? I've been trying now and again to render the same files with no luck.

Our machines aren't that beastly you know. 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 iMacs with 12 GB RAM and 2 GB AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics. They're top of the range for their class but they're compact desktops really. They don't come close to top of the range server or desktop class machines.

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  • 3 months later...

So is there any strategy going forward to actually make cloud rendering work or is it always going to choke on our files?

How much of that percentage of successful renders are actually Renderworks elevation drawings as opposed to plans and other line drawings? I have a bunch of people (incl. people on your beta program) who have messaged or emailed me privately to point out it's never worked for them either.

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  • 10 months later...

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