Control your builds queue with Build Priorities
In the first TeamCity 6.0 EAP you can find the long-awaited feature — build priorities; you asked — we did it. Moreover, since it is implemented as a Build Queue Priorities plugin for TeamCity, it is also available for TeamCity 5.1.x.
Now you can control build priorities by creating so-called Priority Classes — in two words, a priority class is a set of build configurations with a specified priority. Naturally, these classes can be configured from the Build Queue page, but note that only users with System administrator role can access these settings.
You can add as many priority classes as you need, add build configurations to them according to your needs and define the priority in the range -100..100. This setting is taken into account only when a build is added to the queue. The builds with higher priority will have more chances to appear at the top of the queue; however, you shouldn’t worry that the build with lower priority won’t ever run. If a build spent long enough in the queue, it won’t be outrun even by builds with higher priority.
Also note that by default you already have two predefined priority classes — Personal (priority=10) and Default(priority=0).
The first one is used for personal builds (Remote run or Pre-tested commit) only, i.e. any personal build added to the queue will be assigned to this priority class. The Default class simply includes all the builds not associated with any other class. This allows to create a class with priority lower than default and place some builds to the bottom of the queue.
We’ve had a lot of discussions about this feature, because there were many ways to implement it. We picked the one that seems the best, however we encourage you to try it and share your feedback with us. Try it!
The JetBrains TeamCity Team
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