Error: failed to sync frame with following clients
 

What exactly causes this error message?

When using a cluster you'll get this message if one of the clients is falling behind in rendering, or UDP packets are being dropped.

Ok.

Can you explain in more detail how the master and clients synchronize with each other?

Thanks.

At the end of every frame each client will send a UDP sync packet to the master. Once the master receives a sync packet from each client, it will broadcast a UDP message to all the clients telling them to go ahead and display the frame.

The master will wait up to 500 ms to receive the sync packet from all the clients. After this amount of time, it will display the sync error message with a list of all the clients it did not receive a sync packet from.

As Jeff mentioned, the two common causes for this error message is that a client is falling behind during a frame or the UDP sync packet is being dropped by your network.

Are you receiving a lot of these error messages? It is normal to receive a few of these messages during the lifetime of a clustered script.