Miscellaneous Features

The following section discusses several important plan and/or job properties.

 

  1. Job OS Priority. This property, which should not be confused with Queue Priority, controls the execution priority of the job within an operating system context. Windows uses keywords that indicate the priority class of execution.  Many other operating systems use priority numbers (usually 0 to 31), with the higher number indicating a higher priority.

  2. Queue Priority. This property, which should not be confused with Job Priority, controls the order of the job on an ActiveBatch queue. The factory policy default is ten (10). Higher values mean higher priority and closer to the head of the queue and execution. ActiveBatch does offer a Change Priority operation that can be used to change a queued instance’s priority in the event you need to immediately change a job’s order within a queue. A priority greater than 100 is typically reserved for SLA-sensitive Jobs which may be in jeopardy of being breached.

  3. Run Job Interactively. This property controls whether an interactive job can be executed and gain access to the desktop. This property is applicable to Microsoft Windows only. ActiveBatch does not currently offer interactive support for non-Windows systems. When enabled, you may further specify whether the running application is to execute in a minimized, maximized or normal window. Use of this feature requires that AbatIDH be properly setup. Note: Users who need to send data to the window should examine the SendKeys COM object.

  4. Terminate child processes on completion. This property controls whether the termination of the job should also cause the termination of any child processes by that job. This can be a very important property to enable if you create, implicitly or explicitly, additional processes as part of the main job invocation. For example, the running of msdev.exe (Visual Studio) will also cause several other processes to be invoked as well. With this property enabled, when msdev.exe terminates or is aborted, you also want any child processes to be terminated as well.

  5. Working Directory. This property is used to establish the current directory for the job on startup; however, it is also used when looking up the input filename of a Process Job. Clever users can omit the path portion of the input filename since the actual path will be resolved by the working directory.

  6. Processor Mask. ActiveBatch provides a property for associating processors with a given job.  This allows you to deploy critical CPU resources where you best need them. The default is ALL. You fill out this field by indicating a range of values from zero (0) through the number of CPUs you have (minus one) as to which processors should be used.  For example, 0, 5-7 means that CPU 0, 5, 6 and 7 are to be used. Please note that some operating systems won’t allow you to deploy CPU 0 as part of a processor set.

  7. If Job/Plan Active. This set of properties controls the number of active instances a plan or job can have and what should be done when multiple instances are to be executed.

    By policy default, only one (1) instance of a plan/job can be active. An attempt to run a second instance will cause that instance to be skipped. You can change that selection as noted above. You may also indicate that multiple instances are supported to a specific value and then what is to happen when that value is exceeded. You may also indicate that the second instance should wait (“n” second or forever) until the first instance completes.

    Note: A skipped instance is treated as “Not Run”; it is neutral in terms of success or failure job/plan resolution. 

Note: Multiple instance support should be consistent across related jobs and plans. For example, a plan that supports 2 instances while the underlying jobs may support only 1 is asking for trouble.

  1. Job History. This property controls how long a job’s history is to be present within ActiveBatch.

     

     

    By default, a job’s history is present for five (5) days. Specifying “Delete on Completion” means the job instance is immediately deleted. This isn’t recommended since a client will not be able to determine how a job ran except by visually inspecting the jobs log file. Note: If centrally managed log files are used, the retention period must be less than or equal to this history retention period.