FFAStrans forum

Hi,

I recently started to use this great transcoding solution, as well as the web interface which is very powerful, specially on a farm environment and with many users involved. Congratulations to all who have contributed to this great solution.

I made a few workflows to test FFAStrans and the success rate have been very good, but now I placed a workflow in production I am struggling with an issue which is the fact that the same job starts running multiple times.
As said, I have configured a farming environment, so all host are using a global shared media cache. The wokflow is monitoring a network folder, where to MXF files are exported. I tried to use "Check growing files" - Once and Continuously - but the result is the same. The workflow ends as expected, but since the job runs many times, for some of them I get the error "Process exited with error code: 1 (The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.)".

I have 3 hosts assigned to this workflow, but most of the times the processors run on the same host.

Can you please help me understand what I'm missing here?

Thanks!
Ricardo

Hi Ricardo, thank you for using FFAStrand and welcome to the forum!

I would like to take a look at your workflow and your ffastrans.ini file. Can you export your workflow and send the files?

-steinar

Hi Steinar,

Thanks a lot for being helpful!

I have just created the workflow from scratch (it was not that complicated) and this new one it now working again as expected! Didn't understand why the other one doesn't, since the new one is exactly the same. Maybe something's wrong with the workflow ID .ini file?...

Maybe you find the reason! Anyway, I'm sending the ffastrans.ini and the workflow files, if you're willing to take a look.

Ricardo

Hi Steinar,

I found a monitors.ini file under folder ..\Processors\.cache\wfs\%WorkflowID%\mons, which has 3 "mon_folder" entries. Can this be the cause? Maybe this was due to changes I made to the worflow, regarding the watchfolder...

[mon_folder 20190514-185329-506-ee905a0c4d96]
update=1
[mon_folder 20190622-004653-470-f2b3ee9674cd]
update=1
[mon_folder 20190622-125140-639-abe1951a748b]
update=1

The monitors.ini file of the new workflow I created only has one entry.

Hi Ricardo,

The reason you had trouble is because you have 3 monitors picking up the same files and at the end you have a node that tries to move the original file. This will cause the conflict you are seeing. TThe three monitor nodes have been lying on top of each other causing you to only see one. If you press Ctrl+r in the editor of your faulty workflow you will see the three monitor nodes appear.

-steinar

I really don't know how did that happened. But it's good to keep in mind that the Auto arrange can be useful to see hidden nodes.

Thanks again Steinar!