I'm rendering with HtoA on deadline right now and am having problems with the same rendernodes having different rendertimes. Rendertime right now seems to differ from about 5-10 minutes on a frame to 2-2,5 hours. The frames look completely similar and the only reason i've found seems to be a something called InitializeNodes in the deadline log. Does anyone know what Arnolds InitializeNodes does and where or how i can fix it?
Logs here
It's possible this has been fixed in a newer version of Arnold. For instance, Arnold 5.3.1.1 has the following fix:
Thank you for replying! I will try to get an update but could be hard in the middle of a project. It just seems so strange that the same rendernode will differ 2 hours in rendertime between 2 frames that have nothing added or taken away.
You could also try disabling options.parallel_node_init until you upgrade to a newer arnold. That of course can make that stage slower since it's just using a single CPU core, but compared to the huge slowdown you're sometimes getting, you'll probably still be much faster.