Job priority

Overview

In order to speed up receiving of certain files on certain agents priorities feature can be used. All jobs, apart from a Script job, can be prioritized. Basically the idea is that a job with a higher priority will be executed first. It's possible to prioritize only file downloads, i.e. option works for destination agents in Distribution and Consolidation jobs, and downloading agents in Sync job.

Job priority does not affect agent process priority on the system it's running on. Increasing job priority does not cause the agent to consume more hardware and system resources.

There are a few places to tweak priorities depending on the current need: job itself, a current job run, or some agent in a job run.

Job Priority

Can be changed in Job settings. 

 When a new job is created it's queued depending on its priority.

• If there's already a job with higher priority, the new job will wait till that one stops transferring files. While waiting, the low-priority job will still be indexing files on agents and merging folder tree, but no files will be synced! Each job run will have the same priority as job. Changed priority of a Distribution or Consolidation job won't be applied to a currently active Job Run, but only to the next launched runs.
• If there's already a job with lower priority running, it will be allowed to finish current transfer and agents will switch to the new higher-priority job. When it's also done transferring, agents will continue with non-finished low-priority jobs.
• When there are a few jobs with same priority, they'll be performed simultaneously.
• When a job is awaiting its queue, agents will be showing  status.

Job Run Priority

Job runs inherit priority from the job - each run of this job will have the same priority as the job. It's possible to change priority of a currently active Job Run in its details on tab "Settings". There's no need to restart the job in this case, but the updated priority will be applied to only this current run. All concurrent runs will take the job's priority.

Job Run for an agent

Transfer priority can be changed for an agent so that some jobs are finished before others for this particular agent. This only applies to an agent that receives files: destination agents in Distribution and Consolidation jobs, and a downloading agent in Sync job. If an agent is a receiver in low-prio job and is sender in a high-prio job, it won't be downloading until upload is done. 

These priorities are applied only to the given agent and are not going to affect other agents in the job, they are going to work in accordance with Job's priority setting. To change transfer priority for an agent from AGENTS click on the Agent name -> Jobs tab. Make sure to enable column "Priority" and change priority from drop down menu.  It cannot be changed for the transfers that are successfully finished.

By default Job's priority is applied, and can be seen as "Default (N)" in the menu, where N is inherited from Job's settings. If a transfer gets a higher priority, others are paused for this agent. Once the first one is done, agent switches to the next transfer with higher priority. If there are a few with same priority, they'll be done simultaneously. The transfers that are currently paused have  status. 

Starting with Resilio Connect v2.4.2 these also work in API.