Re: [Condor-users] Interesting use of backfill

[Dan Bradley <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Erik Paulson wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 02:39:10PM +0300, Mark Silberstein wrote:
>  
>
> > The only problem was to kill startd when the actual program termintates.
> > So at the moment we make the program that is started by startd kill startd
> > right before the termination. But it's awkward. If we had a parameter in
> > startd, which would trigger it to suicide when backfill executable dies
> > itself - this would be fantastic. We have no problems with fixing that
> > ourselves, but we thought maybe this parameter can be added in 6.9.x
> > series.
> >
> > Any other ideas would be appreciated!
> >    
>
> You could try STARTD_NOCLAIM_SHUTDOWN, which is the number of seconds the
> startd will stay unclaimed before shutting itself down. It may work
> with "Backfill" jobs as the "Claim", but I'm not sure if it does (or, 
> actually, even if it should! :)
>  
I checked the code.  Backfill does count as a claim for this purpose, so 
your idea should work.

Another idea is to use the new DAEMON_SHUTDOWN expression, but you might 
have to wait for 6.9.4.  In 6.9.4, there will be attributes in the 
startd ad advertising how much time it has spent in each state+activity, 
so you would be able to configure the shutdown expression to stop the 
startd if some backfill time has been used, but the slot is no longer in 
the backfill state.

> Another idea is to use MaxJobRetirementTime or condor_off -peaceful to let
> the startd run until the job boundry. Again, I'm not sure that the startd
> treats the "backfill" as a job, so it may not work either.
>  

I checked the code for this too.  MaxJobRetirementTime doesn't apply to 
backfill, so this one won't work.

--Dan