Jenkins: Stagger triggering of next pipeline steps

Question

I have a daily Jenkins trigger job that sets off a bunch of CI jobs based on a cron timer. All the daily jobs are set off by this trigger job, the daily job itself doesn't do anything.

However, this causes a bit of a load on the infrastructure available when all these jobs start executing all at once. Is there any way to stagger the triggering of these next steps in the pipeline over a period of time?

Answer 1

Refer to the answer here if that helps: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12472740

There is a H parameter in the cron and you can also set a range in time for the H parameter: https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/blob/master/core/src/main/resources/hudson/triggers/TimerTrigger/help-spec.jelly#L47

Answer 2

I'd take a look at throttling your concurrent builds to reduce load:

https://plugins.jenkins.io/throttle-concurrents/

Answer 3

This is an example of a thundering herd issue.

A common way to deal with this issue is to sleep for a random amount of time (known as "splay") at the beginning of the job. This spreads out the load over the splay period.