Jenkins Priority Sorter Plugin

Adds the ability to assign different priorities to jobs, the lower the priority a job has, the sooner the job will run.

This can be very helpful, when one wants to add low priority jobs, but wants to have higher-priority jobs run first. This is especially true when hardware is limited, or when there are different groups of jobs that should share resources (equally).

Fundamentals

The plugin is build around some basic concepts:

• Queue Strategy
• Job Group
• Job Inclusion Strategy, and
• Priority Strategy.

First, the Queue Strategy describes how the priority of a job is interpreted. It will translate the job's assigned priority to a corresponding weight in the queue. The queue is, then, sorted based on the assigned weight.

With the Priority Sorter, you will need to group your jobs into Job Groups. A Job Group's Job Inclusion Strategy devides whether a specific job should be included in the group.

The priority of the job is then set by the Priority Strategy, and each Job Group can have any number priority strategies.

When a new job is queued, the following will happen:

• The Priority Sorter will go though the configured Job Groups from top to bottom.
  • When it finds a Job Group where the job is to be included, it will look though the Priority Strategies from top to bottom
    • When it finds a Priority Strategy that matches its criteria, it will use this strategy to assign a priority the the Job.
• The Priority Sorter will then consult the Queue Strategy to translate the priority to a weight, i.e. a position in the queue.

Queue Strategies

There are three included Queue Strategies, each of which will sort the Queue differently.

Absolute

Each job will be assigned a priority, and, the lower the priority, the sooner the job will be run.

Fair Queuing

Each Job will be assigned a priority, but the queue will try to share the resources equally over different priorities in a round-robin fashion.

Weighted Fair Queuing

The same as Fair Queuing, but jobs with a lower priority will be run more frequently those with higher a priority. Remember, that the lower the priority assignment, the higher the importance.

Job Inclusion Strategies

This setting describes which jobs are included in a Job Group, and is relatively self explanatory. It is worth mentioning the "Jobs Marked for Inclusion" setting. When this is selected, you are requested to enter a name of the Job Group. This name will then be an available option on each job, providing an alternative "bottom-up" way to group jobs, rather than the default "top-down" approach of the other strategies.

Priority Strategies

It is possible to assign the priority, based on different Priority Strategies.

This setting describes what priority a job should have, and is self explanatory. It is worth mentioning the the "Take the Priority from Property on the Job" setting. When selected, a drop-down - where you can select a priority - appears on all projects that would generate jobs to be included in this group.

Main Configuration

The main configuration options are available on the Jenkins configuration page. Configuration options for Priority Strategy are available on its own page, accessible from the root actions menu.

On the main configuration page, you can select the number of priorities you would like to use, as well as a default priority to use where no other priority could be assigned.

** Please note that lower number means higher priority! See details on the screen, for the specifics on each strategy. **

Assigning Priorities

On the main menu, you will find the link to a page where you can assign priorities to each Job

On this page you will be able to assign jobs to groups, and priorities to jobs.

** Please note that all matching is done top to bottom by first match**

You can limit access to this functionality to administrators, by checking the appropriate check-box on the main configuration page.

Run Exclusive

If a job from a Run Exclusive job group gets started, jobs from other groups will remain blocked, and will not get executed until all jobs from the Run Exclusive job group are complete, regardless of priority.

Using the View Column

Since a job can get a different priority each time it is started, the view column cannot show the "correct" priority for the Job.

The column will show the priority used the last time the job was launched, and, if the job has not been started yet, the column will show Pending.

Notable changes and upgrading

Upgrading from 2.x

In version 3.x, the option "Allow priorities directly on Jobs" has been removed in favor of the Priority Strategy "Take the priority from Property on the Job" (see above). Legacy Mode is removed (see above regarding upgrading from version 1.x).

Upgrading from 1.x

Version 2.x is a complete rewrite of the plugin, but still supports running in version 1.x compatibility mode. However if you are satisfied with the functionality of 1.x, there is little point in upgrading.
Upgrading from version 1.x to version 3.x will remove all 1.x configurations. Therefore, if you need to keep configured values, upgrade to 2.x, first, switch to Advanced Mode, and then upgrade from 2.x to 3.x.

Troubleshooting

To get some inside information on how, and why, a certain job gets a certain priority, you can turn on some extra logging.

• Logger: PrioritySorter.Queue.Items
  • To get more info on the assigned priorities, and state transition of the items in the queue, set the log level to FINE.
  • To get more info on how the jobs are matched to job groups, and rules to get the priority, set the log level to FINER.

To get logging on when the Queue Sorter is active log, use:

• Logger: PrioritySorter.Queue.Sorter*,* with the level set to FINE.
  • To see all items sorted (the queue) by the Queue Sorter, set the log level to FINER.

Release Notes

• For recent versions, see GitHub Releases
• For versions 3.6 and older, see the changelog archive