Scheduling Worker Configurations

[mim]

Hi there,

i was wondering what the best approach would be for creating a scheduled worker configuration.

the reason for this is that large 3d renderjobs get in the way of faster nuke jobs on a workday and the latter will have to wait until the 3d job is finished. i'm aware that aggressive preemption could solve this, but i guess it's a bit too brutal.

being able to adapt the built-in locking-scheduler to control worker groups would be a neat way to solve this.

so for example in the morning some workers will be assigned to a "nuke" group, so that those machines remain free for nuke jobs, and in the evening the group should be changed to "alljobs" so that they won't idle when all the "nuke" jobs are finished.

obviously having a script overwrite the qbwrk.conf would be the straighforward approach to do this, but maybe there is a more elegant way using the python-api of qube?

cheers
mikko

[BrianK]

Hello Mikko,

Having a separate set of qbwrk.conf files is your best bet at this time.

I might suggest creating a symbolic link called qbwrk.conf that points to, for example, night_qbwrk.conf or day_qbwrk.conf.  The create a cron job or scheduled task that relinks the file at the correct time of day, then calls "qbadmin worker --reconfigure" to push out the new config.  Doing it this way means that there's no chance to destroying data by a script going bad.

We may implement time-based configurations in the future.  Until then, this is the best way to go.