Rendering gets stuck on first pass

[Ink Visual]

Hi all,
For some time already I have problems with renderings on one of the machines in the office. Some scenes stuck on first pass while rendering, I tried to identify the source of a problem but without success so far.

1. It all starts with quite slow scene parsing and GI calculation.
2. Once that's done the first pass starts to clear up but never progresses further, estimated rendering time rises to infinity (see attached)
https://ibb.co/hM5WHy
3. I've attached mini dump file from the 1st pass stage. I've also some minidumps from GI calculation stage if needed
https://we.tl/p5qewQM47U

Few points to note:
-the problem starts mostly at the very final project stage when we render stuff at higher resolution (5000px wide), lower resolutions (2k, 3k) would normally work fine
-it only happens on machine running on dual Xenon E5-2680 0 @2.7 GHz, 32GB RAM, Windows 7, latest Corona 1.7 (hotfix 4, although the problem was there on hotfix 3 too)
-I have chacked the machine itself to make sure it's not a hardware issue and it's definitely not. High load tests using OCCT are all fine

-exactly same scene, same settings will render without problems on other (slightly stronger) machine, i9 7900x 3.3GHz, 32GB RAM, Windows 10,  latest Corona 1.7 (hotfix 4)
-if I render the scene using DR, with i9 as a Master PC and Xenon machine as a slave, it will again get stuck on 1st pass. So adding faulty machine as a slave is spreading the problem onto the Master PC
-I work mostly on heavy scenes (file size usually exceeds 1GB), but I didn't have the problem in the past, optimising the scene rarely helps
-both, dusk and dalight scenes suffer from this issue

In general I must say that Corona's performance on Xenon machine seems to drop with every next release. I feel like 1.6 was faster and less problematic, especially regarding IR.
I would be grateful for any advice, right now Xenon machine is not reliable at all, I never know if it's going to render the file or not.
I haven't used to have this kind of troubles with earlier Corona releases, nor have I experienced it with other rendering engines, so I believe it must be some sort of Corona related problem.

Thanks!

[sprayer]

i think you don't have enough RAM for your scene, try to optimize it(disable displacement, convert texture to jpg and lower resolution, enable low memory option) and test it. It is not stuck just very slow rendering then 3ds max trying to use hdd space then ram memory is not enough

[Ink Visual]

i think you don't have enough RAM for your scene

Thanks sprayer, although as I mentioned, when I render exactly the same scene on another workstation it all goes well. Both machines have 32GB RAM so I don't understand how being low on RAM would affect Xenon but won't bother i9?

[Moataz]

some crazy thinking here... :D
did you try just region render a part of it and see what it goes...
and if you tried to make the res. lower ? :)

Cheers,

[maru]

3. I've attached mini dump file from the 1st pass stage. I've also some minidumps from GI calculation stage if needed

-please provide all minidumps you have
-also capturing and sending more minidumps from the "frozen" stage could be useful
-next time please zip the minidumps - often you will end up with 10x smaller file :)
-have you tried with Corona v2? https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000570015
-it would be also great if you could send us the problematic scene (see my signature for a private uploader)

[maru]

Any update here?

[Ink Visual]

Hi Maru,
Thanks for keeping track on this topic. Sorry for not getting back with more information.
I will try to send and and test all he stuff you mentioned in the next couple of days.
Cheers!