Hiding server-side windows in ParaView

If you routinely use ParaView in client-server mode, you have probably encountered this situation before: if you’re rendering a large-ish dataset, or you force remote rendering from the Settings dialog, you see blank window(s) pop up on the server nodes. These are the windows in which the server-side rendering takes place. While these windows mean no harm, they can be quite distracting especially if the client and the server are on the same machine. Users could manually pass in the –use-offscreen-rendering command line option of the pvserver, pvrenderserver, or pvbatch executables to not show these windows.

Recent modifications to ParaView (slated to be released in ParaView 5.5) change this behavior. Now, server and batch executables create off-screen windows i.e. windows that are not mapped and hence now visible on your display, by default. There are cases when the server executables require on-screen windows e.g. in tile-display mode. For those, the server automatically creates on-screen windows.

In keeping with “user knows best” philosophy, users can use –force-offscreen-rendering and –force-onscreen-rendering flags to indicate one or the other explicitly, if needed. Consequently, –use-offscreen-rendering command line option has been deprecated and is simply interpreted as –force-offscreen-rendering.

For more details on this and the new flags for building ParaView with onscreen, offscreen, or headless rendering support, see ParaView Doxygen.