[slurm-users] Time spent in PENDING/Priority

[Chip Seraphine]

Hi all,

I am trying to find some good metrics for our slurm cluster, and want it to reflect a factor that is very important to users—how long did they have to wait because resources were unavailable.  This is a very key metric for us because it is a decent approximation of how much life could be improved if we had more capacity, so it’d be an important consideration when doing growth planning, setting user expectations, etc.  So we are specifically interested in how long jobs were in the PENDING state for reason Priority.

Unfortunately, I’m finding that this is difficult to pull out of squeue or the accounting data.    My first thought was that I could simply subtract SubmitTime from EligibleTime (or StartTime), but that includes time spent in expected ways, e.g. waiting while an array chugs along.   The delta between StartTime and EligibleTime does not reflect the time spent PENDING at all, so it’s not useful either.

I can grab some of my own metrics by polling squeue or the REST interface, I suppose, but those will be less accurate, more work, and will not allow me to see my past history.  I was wondering if there was something I was missing that someone on the list has figured out?   Perhaps some existing bit of accounting data that can tell me how long a job was stuck behind other jobs?

--

Chip Seraphine
Grid Operations
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