Is there a way to speed up remote agent registration?

[DaveD]

We run our Bamboo remote agents on a cluster and as such have to start and stop them as different jobs have different cluster requirements.

We have plugins and a dedicated service controlling our agents on the cluster but we've noticed that the remote agents take a short time to launch and make initial contact with the server (when you see the '... a remote agent is loading...' message) but they then take a further 30 seconds or so to register with Bamboo and to be available for jobs to be despatched.

Is there a way we can speed up this registration as it would allow us to considerably simplify our workflow of managing the remote agents on the cluster.

[Przemek Bruski · Accepted solution]

When a build queue is long, agent registration is a costly operation.

The 30 seconds delay you're seeing is a protection mechanism built in to make sure that multiple agents coming up don't destabilise the server.

We have a solution that does away with that delay (and actually improves performance in general) - it was originally planned for inclusion in 5.1, but we weren't able to stress test it well enough. We hope to get it into 5.2.