Regarding Rhino compute - price

[stevebaer]

@jchun726

First, we can install Rhino in a local environment and receive the request directly from users. This option carries lots of shortcomings - A server computer with Rhino software must be ON all the times and parallel computing is not possible unless we purchase multiple licenses. Therefore, our engineer said this would carry too many risks for our web service.

Yes, compute does need to be running in order to process requests. This is why it runs as a service and can restart if something bad happens or the server needs to be rebooted. We use a hosted environment (Amazon Web Services) to offload some of the burden of keeping servers on at all times, but it really isn’t any different than running your own Windows Server.

As far as parallel computing, this is allowed on a single Rhino instance running on your Server. Multiple licenses would need to be purchased if your overall load became high enough that you determined you would need multiple servers running.

@jchun726

Secondly, it is Rhino Compute. It seems that only one instance of Compute per VM is currently allowed. My understanding of Rhino Compute might be wrong, as I just started to look at it. It seems that every Geometry operation calls for Rest API.

This really depends on what the calls are. There are many Rhino API functions that we provide in libraries (.NET, python, or javascript) that run locally on an end user’s computer (or device) without Rhino installed. We would rather simple operations like the length of a line be run on the end user’s device without forcing network calls to compute. The libraries are still being added to, but you can see that there is already quite a bit of functionality included in the existing releases.

• (python) Welcome to rhino3dm’s documentation! — rhino3dm 7.6.0 documentation
• (javascript) Home - Documentation
• (.NET) we don’t have a good API documentation site set up yet, but you can get the Rhino3dmIO nuget packages and see what is included.

@jchun726

In our prototype system, the process at each modeling stage employs more than 100 Rhino APIs. I guess, then, the system needs to call Rest API every time whenever the script uses Rhino operation in one modeling process. This is our main concern with the current Rhino Compute, if my understanding of Compute is correct.

The API provided by compute is not static. Functions are added based on user requests. We may be able to figure out ways to make your 100 API call script into a single call.

I would be more than happy to work with you to help try and figure out what can be done. If you could share your 100 line script with me or provide me some more details, I can get a better idea of what it is you are attempting to accomplish.