Maya 'thin client' startup times?

[AK Eric]

We're researching using a Maya 'thin client' distro:  Running Maya off a server instead of standalone installs.  I'm tired of finding out someone is 3 versions behind (or never installed the updates / patches) and that's why they're having so many bugs...

The only major problem we've hit is startup times:  Maya 2016 will have the UI launch in around 20 seconds, and it's fully usable in 30 (stops being herky-jerky in the perspective view).

But the thinclient takes 45 sec for the UI to launch, and remains super herky-jerky for another minute:  Basically, unusable for about 1:45 from launch.  

It's even more polarizing in batch mode:  Standalone Maya will boot and be usable in 7 seconds. But the thin client still takes a min thirty.  Ouch.

 IT has been trying to tune the server, but for all I know this is what one should expect... or not: Would appreciate anyone's thoughts on this that has a similar setup.

[Justin Israel]

When you talk about a thin client, are you referring to just serving Maya from a network filesystem mount and running it as a local user process? Or are you talking about thin clients where it is actually running on a server and the user is receiving a streamed virtual application?

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[AK Eric]

The first one: "serving Maya from a network filesystem mount and running it as a local user process".

[Justin Israel]

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 5:10 PM AK Eric <war...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

The first one: "serving Maya from a network filesystem mount and running it as a local user process".

Cool. Yea that's what we do at my studio, as well as when I was at Imageworks. I doubt it can be 1-to-1 as fast as loading everything off a local SSD drive; you are subject to network i/o. Bigger studios have the luxury of putting a caching appliance in front of the file server (like Avere) so that hot files can be served out of memory.  I'm not a network/system guy so I don't have a lot of experience with this, but when I was at Siggraph pipeline talks, smaller studios were referring to Pixcache as a cheaper solution.

I am sure your IT people are way more on top of this than anything I could offer. But if strace-ing the load of Maya over a network mount shows that it is spending most of the load time in I/O then maybe the focus should be on caching and optimizing that filer mount for read access.

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[Luke Harris]

Are people using configuration management tools like puppet / chef / salt / ansible / pdq deploy / sccm to make sure workstations have the correct versions of everything? I have no numbers to back this up - but I imagine a network app server will never be as snappy as a local SSD for big apps like maya