Render Client setup in clustered environments

Best practices and troubleshooting for the Render Client configuration in clustered censhare environments.

Configuration

Configuration/Services/Renderer

Our general recommendation is to have at least one renderer instance for each server. If this is the case the configuration must not be changed.

In certain cases it may be possible to have only one renderer. But this has to be checked case by case depending on what tasks are running on which server, load, local servers (e.g. cluster) or remote servers, etc.

For a test environment one renderer logged in to the master server should be OK. All other servers are rendering over the master server. If this is the case the configuration must be changed (indirect).

Indirect configuration - approval

An indirect configuration over the master server in a productive environment should only be configured in the following cases:

• after an approval of the censhare development team (cenQuest)

  • if the censhare application servers are local node/cluster servers

    • advantages in contrast to remote servers at different locations

      • here are no indirect database / RMI connections configured

      • possible network latency and bandwidth problems are not that critical as within remote server environments

  • if there is more than 1 renderer on the master server connected, for example a multi instance indesign server

  • if the rendering jobs (layout/content editor, content updates, ...) are not that much

Indirect configuration - configuration

Create a new activated configuration for the master server (Invocations are set to 0)

• Create a new deactivated configuration for all servers and set the Invocations to 2

  • Due to setting the Invocations to 2 the real limit will be omitted (it would be automatically set by the count of the connected renderer instances).

  • Due to that fact, theoretically if you have 1 master server and 2 node servers (x2 indirect instances) means that 5 renderer instances should be connected to the master server.

• After that a restart of all censhare servers and a re-login of the renderer client on the master server is necessary

Update / refresh configuration

If you change something in any service, you must restart both censhare servers to confirm this. Special cases are the image service and the renderer service.