Would it be possible to have Rhino run separate Rhino files as separate processes?
The most obvious reason being, that it is much better if one Rhino file is processing a command or crashing/freezing, it would thereby not be blocking all other Rhino instances.
Interesting… So there is no way to achieve this? I was using ArchiCAD for some time and as far as I can remember it would always create a separate ArchiCAD process for each file. So a new instance of the program would launch.
It’s hard to implement, but something I would love to get Rhino to be able to do some day. Applications like chrome do this with fancy management of child processes.
To be honest, I don’t think so, but we also don’t yet have a clear roadmap for Rhino 8 just yet - more on that later.
As far as this particular feature is concerned, I can say that we’ve been discussing this for as long as I’ve been involved with Rhino for Mac (8 years now) and it’s one of those “thorny ones.”
But, just to temper expectations a little - as far as Rhino 8 is concerned - there’s already a handful of very large and very technical efforts underway on Mac (Metal support, for example, just to name one), that I have my doubt that we will have the bandwidth to take on another of this magnitude. I hope to be surprised.
Thanks a lot for the information! Always interesting to hear from “under the hood”. There are many cases where it would be highly practical to have files running as different processes, but I do also agree that there are more important and urgent areas that need to be worked on (Metal implementation, GH responsiveness, etc.)
Thanks again and much success, doing my best to support you guys (if I had lots of money, I would just constantly send money to McNeel to support you guys).
that is not correct as far as i know, in this case it is Rhino which is preventing the 2nd instance to open since its detecting the serial nr to be running already.
any other application would open with the help of terminal with as many instances as wanted. to be fair i am also running mojave still, but i dont think that has changed.
It is very interesting to hear that this is so complicated, while it is already working with different versions of Rhino…
Here are my three cents about this topic:
I always think twice, if I really want to have multiple files opened with RH7 at the same time - as just a single session crashing, causes all of them to crash. And crashes are not that seldom…
Another slight issue is with Grasshopper. Having two RH7 files with their respective Grasshopper files opened, it takes some time with larger scripts if one clicks back and forth between those two files. Here they are actually sharing the same Grasshopper process and that seem to add some background computation (I guess for the visualization of the GH objects in the Rhino view?).
Furthermore, if one of the Rhinos is executing a longer process (GH script, Rhino command, rendering, etc.), the other Rhino is not usable. So even if the mentioned process only uses one core, one has to wait until that process is finished.
But yeah… I agree, that there are currently more important topics that have to be developed for Rhino. Would be nice if there was a way to achieve this in a not too work-intensive way…
No (and I realize that this is probably another case where “no news is not good news.”) I am aware of some “experiments,” but nothing that would make its way into a WIP any time soon.
Opening multiple instances of an application is common on the Mac. You do it through the terminal:
open -n /Applications/Rhino\ 7.app/
The problem, as has been noted, is that the Rhino license manager does not allow this to take place since it detects another instance being used. This does not happen on Windows, where you can have multiple instances of Rhino open. I emailed support about this and they replied that it should work, but I take it from others here that it does not.
Looks like it is possible to run multiple instances of Rhino and only the license manager is stopping it? Or is this issue more complex @dan, @stevebaer?
Yes, there would be more to do; Rhino for Mac is truly a multi-doc application, unlike Rhino for Windows, so the plumbing for that part is quite a bit different.