We've had a lot of problems recently with instability of our BB render farm. We're running Max2014, and for a long time ran BB as a Windows service. Now, when running as a service, render nodes go 'absent' for no reason, or receive a job from the BB Manager, but never process it. Lots of cursing and manual process killing ensues!
I resorted to trying to run BB Server as a foreground app on each render node, and honestly, it's been running much better like this. I still intend to switch back to the services at some point, but not yet.
One problem though. When running as a background service, BB starts up max as a background process - ie, you never see the Max application running. When you run BB server as a forground app, Max starts in the foreground, and you can see visibly see each frame being rendered. Ideally, I'd like to keep the Max process hidden, but still run BB in the foregound. Is this possible?
Finally, again related to BB Server as a foreground app. When a job finishes on a render node, rather than gracefully closing, Max crashes with a Windows APPCRASH message. A new process is spawned for a next job, and max re-launches and runs ok, but you end up with a lot of crashed processes that need to be manually closed. No idea why this is happening, but it happens with every job.
Max is v2014SP5. BB is v2014.0.3
