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Martin Pace Author

Level 5

5,115 points

How to set up Qmaster with Terminal in Mavericks

I have a Mac Pro 5,1, 12-core with 24 GB of RAM and am trying to set up Qmaster to fully use my CPUs as a quickcluster. My current Qmasterprefs as indicated in Terminal are listed below and I'm looking for someone who can help me with the Terminal commands needed to be entered to set it up.

Martys-Mac-Pro:~ mepace$ qmasterprefs -list

Current settings:

-allowBonjourDiscovery on

-sharingType servicesAndQuickCluster

-launchContentAgent off

-log 3 truncate on

-statusMenu on

Exception: no config file entry for service "jobcontroller:com.apple.qmaster.cluster.admin"

Compressor, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Nov 18, 2013 4:19 PM

26 replies

Nov 20, 2013 12:07 PM in response to Fred Turner

Update: I installed the full Compressor on my C2D MacBook Pro running Mavericks; previously I had only installed the Qmaster components. It seems to work right for me, but may perhaps require some tweaking to make it it operate as expected.

In your screenshot, you show "compressord" as the active process w/ some, but not all of your cores being used. This tells us you are NOT making use of the cluster and all instances. On test runs I just performed w/ both the "H.264 LAN" and "AppleTV 5Mbps" presets, my MBP shows 2 "CompressorTranscoderX" processes both running at 95+%. Oddly, though, the AppleTV preset uses fewer job "chunks" when observed via Batch Monitor.

Anyway, I think for some reason, after you restarted, maybe the Cluster wasn't fully functional, or somehow Compressor didn't properly hand off to it.

Martin Pace Author

Level 5

5,115 points

Nov 20, 2013 1:24 PM in response to Fred Turner

I was testing with a 2 minute video clip previously. Just plugged in a 2 hour test clip and all cylinders are firing.

Thanks for your help!

Nov 20, 2013 1:31 PM in response to Martin Pace

Fantastic! Glad we got that all sorted out. It may require some care and feeding at times w/ those Terminal commands to get it to cooperate, but the improvement in compression speed should be well worth it.

Interesting to note that 4 instances show as responding while the other 8 show as not responding. I wonder if that changes over the course of the batch. Also interesting that you're definitely getting some use out of your HyperThreading there, w/ 11 of your 12 of your instances getting well over 100%. Not sure if it would help you (may, in fact, hurt the results), but it might be fun to try the "-service" line for Compressor w/ >12 instances. :-D

Keep us posted!

Martin Pace Author

Level 5

5,115 points

Nov 20, 2013 1:40 PM in response to Fred Turner

Fred Turner wrote:

Interesting to note that 4 instances show as responding while the other 8 show as not responding. I wonder if that changes over the course of the batch. Also interesting that you're definitely getting some use out of your HyperThreading there, w/ 11 of your 12 of your instances getting well over 100%. Not sure if it would help you (may, in fact, hurt the results), but it might be fun to try the "-service" line for Compressor w/ >12 instances. :-D

Keep us posted!

FT

Eventually all of the instances show not responding but the % CPU still changes.

The manual recommends 1 instance for every 2 GB of installed memory, since I just happen to have 24 GB 12 instances makes sense. Activity Monitor shows that only 10.7 GB are being used though. CPU usage seems to be increasing as the job progresses. Fairly steady in the mid 80% range for my user right now, even saw 96% briefly so I don't think I need to up the # of instances. 🙂

Apr 6, 2014 1:34 PM in response to Martin Pace

Thanks for this GREAT thread Martin & Fred! Just moved to Mavericks, so your thread came to the rescue for my Qmaster issue.

Cheers

Apr 11, 2014 1:56 AM in response to Fred Turner

-deleted

Apr 11, 2014 7:35 AM in response to Fred Turner

... and a little Terminal Shell Script copied into the auto-login prefs pane:

#!/bin/bash

qmasterprefs -service "Compressor Processing" on instances 8

qmasterprefs -cluster on quickclusterservername "MACPRO"

qmasterprefs -statusMenu off

qmasterprefs -statusMenu on

Thanks again. Cheers

Apr 15, 2014 8:37 AM in response to Berend de Meyer

Updated the script for reset cluster when wake-up after sleep!

#!/bin/bash

qmasterprefs -resetCluster

qmasterprefs -service "Compressor Processing" on instances 8

qmasterprefs -cluster on quickclusterservername "MACPRO"

qmasterprefs -statusMenu off

qmasterprefs -statusMenu on

Apr 22, 2014 12:13 AM in response to Martin Pace

You have to be careful when copying and pasting formatted text into the Terminal window. It looks like the speech marks may have been fancy "curly" ones that the Terminal doesn't recognize. I'd recommend typing the command out manually just to be sure.

Apr 22, 2014 12:33 AM in response to Maria A Martin

Not sure I fully understand what you mean by formatted text?

hope2win

Level 1

0 points

Oct 1, 2014 2:53 AM in response to Fred Turner

Hi Fred

I have been using this thread to try and get Compressor to work with Mavericks, and learning a lot about Terminal while doing so.

But no matter what I try I cannot get things to work - every time I tweak the settings then try and submit a job via Compressor, the button is greyed out. I just cannot get a Cluster to appear as an option.

I've struggled with Batch Monitor, QAdministrator and am about to give up but thought I would see if you could help in any way at all.

I have not posted any details as I didn't want to be presumptious or make demands on your time.

But thank you for reading this...

Peter

How to set up Qmaster with Terminal in Mavericks