Is it possible to make Jenkins create workers from attached clouds faster?

Question

I have an instance of Jenkins that uses the mesos plugin. Nearly all of my jobs get triggered via Mesos tasks. I would like to make worker generation a bit more aggressive.

The current issue is that, for the mesos plugin, I have all of the jobs marking the mesos tasks as one-time usage slaves and when a build is in progress on one of these slaves Jenkins forces any queued jobs to wait for a potential executor on these slaves, as opposed to spinning up new instances.

Based on the logs, it also seems like Jenkins has a timer that periodically checks to see if any slaves should be spun up based on the # of queued jobs / excess workload. Is it possible to decrease the polling interval for that process?

Answer 1

From Mesos Jenkins Plugin Readme: over provisioning flags

By default, Jenkins spawns slaves conservatively. Say, if there are 2 builds in queue, it won't spawn 2 executors immediately. It will spawn one executor and wait for sometime for the first executor to be freed before deciding to spawn the second executor. Jenkins makes sure every executor it spawns is utilized to the maximum. If you want to override this behavior and spawn an executor for each build in queue immediately without waiting, you can use these flags during Jenkins startup:

-Dhudson.slaves.NodeProvisioner.MARGIN=50 -Dhudson.slaves.NodeProvisioner.MARGIN0=0.85