Getting Started - abueide/harry-plotter GitHub Wiki

The Basics

Harry Plotter works on the concept of a “Plot Job”. A plot job is simply a description of how you want a plot to be created. Each plot job can only make one plot at a time, but in turn you can view the stats for that particular job. You can also easily duplicate plot jobs by right clicking them and selecting duplicate to run more than 1 in parallel. This makes for easy setup and fine tuned control and monitoring of each plot you want to run in parallel.

Stagger Settings

You can find the global stagger settings by going to settings -> stagger settings at the top left. These stagger settings only apply to jobs started by the stagger manager (when you click start stagger). Jobs manually started with the start button are self-managed and not accounted for by the stagger manager.

Maximum Phase 1 Plots - This is the maximum number of jobs that can be in phase 1 at any given time. It will wait to start new jobs until the number of jobs in phase 1 is less than this number.

Maximum Phase 2-4 plots - Same thing as above but for phases 2-4 combined.

Maximum Total Plots - This is just the maximum number of plots in general that can be running at any given time. It will not go above this unless you’ve started plots manually with the start button.

Static Stagger Time - This is the minimum amount of time (in minutes) that needs to pass before it will start a new job. This works in tandem with the other settings.

Setting any of these settings to 0 will make it have no maximum/limit.

Drives

The drives tab is for defining drive specific settings. For example you can set up stagger settings per drive. This is useful for when you have a fast ssd and a slow ssd. Simply add the drive by defining its base path (D:\ or E:\ etc.). Drive paths are just defined by their base path so you can also use this to define different settings per folder on the same physical drive. This also allows you to use folder mounted drives & folder mounted network drives.

Any jobs with temp dirs that match the drive’s base path will use that drive’s settings. In the future more options will be added to this tab such as making a cache drive to decrease copy times and increase your plots per day across your main plotting ssds. It will also allow you to define destination drives and autobalance your finished plots across them to maximize your IO lanes (whether they’re network or just between drives on the same machine).

Graceful/Forceful Stops & Restarting/Upgrading Harry Plotter

Clicking the red x on the program will ask you if you want to perform a graceful stop or a force stop. A graceful stop will let the plots finish and then stop. A forceful stop will each job & delete any temp files associated with that plot. If you select graceful stop you’ll be able to reattach to the job processes by reopening harry plotter. This means you can upgrade/close harry plotter while plots are running. These same graceful/force stop options are provided when clicking the stop all button.

The stagger manager will automatically clear temp files from non-running plot jobs & start again every time you open harry plotter, unless you click stop all and then force stop. This is useful for people who want to automatically run harry plotter on startup or automatically restart when power is lost or the computer crashes.

Key Management

Harry Plotter will automatically import any public keys on the local machine. (It does not read, touch or store any private keys). However you don’t need to add any keys to the local machine for harry plotter. You can import public keys manually using the “add key” button. This is useful for more secure setups where you don’t have to trust me nor any other software running on your plotting machine.