Task Cap increase automation

Legacy Scale
1

Hi Guys,

Is there a way to increase the limit of the Task Cap on the Octopus Server via the command line? I was under the impression that this would work however it doesn’t appear to affect the Task cap under Configuration => Nodes => Task Cap:
configure --instance “OctopusServer” --maxConcurrentTasks 100

What am I missing here?

Cheers!
Flynn

2

Hi Flynn,

Thanks for getting in touch! It looks like that configuration setting didn’t get the love and attention it needed after going from Octopus 2.x to 3.x where we introduced Octopus High Availability clusters.

The setting was supposed to limit the maximum number of tasks that will be run by the entire cluster - but the value is stored independently in each node’s configuration file. The end result is that it doesn’t work as expected.

Proposal

I’m proposing to get rid of the concept of a cluster-wide throttle, and just let it become the “sum of Node.TaskCap across the cluster”. If each node in a 4-node cluster has a Task Cap of 5, the resulting cluster-task-cap would be 4 x 5 = 20. The configuration command could be removed altogether, and we only use the Task Cap in the Configuration > Nodes page.

How does that feel to you? I noticed you mentioned automation. What is the reason for automating this configuration in your scenario?

Hope that helps!
Mike

3

Hi Michael,

Thanks for getting back to me. We’re not running in any Cluster, just a single Octopus Server (Enterprise License). All of our Infrastructure is in the Cloud and run a tight ship with transient environments in that we recycle our whole environment (including Octopus Server) every 7 days. When Octopus server is terminated and a new one is launched the bootstrap script (userdata) configures the Octo Server the only thing we’ve not been able to configure via the command line is this Task Cap.

The default of 5 is way too low for us since we will sometimes have 50-60 servers registering tentacles at the same time and thus triggering their auto-deploy.

Thanks
Flynn

4

Hi Flynn,

Thanks for getting back to me! That makes sense. I’ve created this GitHub issue where you can track the work I’ll do to enable this scenario, and remove the misleading “cluster-task-cap”: https://github.com/OctopusDeploy/Issues/issues/3556

Hope that helps!
Mike