On 25 Apr 2007, at 4:12 pm, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
... or would supply some meaningless values...
For example, if the queue is limited to 24h maximum runtime and
they would set 24h as their requirement, thinking that it would
certainly cover what they want and the job would not run anyway
longer than that, as it would be killed by the scheduler. Even when
they run sets of identical jobs, for which they could very well
predict the needed runtime after the first 1 or a few jobs have
finished... And the most painful part is that quite of lot of these
users also feel very strongly that they are doing nothing wrong:
they set a value which is less-or-equal than the maximum allowed,
"so it's got to be right, no ?"
(obviously, if the queue limit would be set to something different
(say 12h) they would simply adjust to the new value ;-)).
With our queueing system that forces the job into a lower priority
queue. If they want their job to run with higher priority, they have
to be more accurate. So indeed, they're not doing anything wrong,
but they're pushing themselves down the priority list in favour of
people who are being a bit smarter.
For sites which charge for machine time, of course, that's a further
selection pressure. Many systems I've spoken with people about
charge you for the time you ask for, not what you use (and obviously
don't let you use more than what you asked for); so the above
approach by users wastes a lot of their money.
Tim
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