Hi,

Is there any way to set a particular job to have a higher priority and always run, at the expense other job, already running. My hypothetical scenario is this (AEP 9.1, HF2, Windows server 2008)...

2 types of protocols job are predominantly run on a server - Search and QuickSearch. These can be called by many users concurrently

Search can take anything from a few seconds to hours to run, depending on what a user is doing.

Quick search will only take 3-4 seconds.

I always want Quicksearch to run and return results within a few seconds as users / other apps are waiting. In effect it is my priority job / protocol.

If I have the 'Running Job Limit' on the AEP server set to 10 it will allow a maximum of 10 jobs to be running concurrently.

So (hypothetically) if 10 people started Search and each job run for 1 hour, then no new jobs would be started for ~1 hour and the existing jobs finish.

This means the quick search won't run for 1 hour.

Is there any way I can tell AEP that the QuickSearch is able to 'pause' one of the longer running jobs, run and then continue to long running job. In effect get priority? Or perhaps reserve 2 out of the 10

'Running Job Limit' jobs to quick search only?

I've seen there a 'Job Priority Switching' setting, I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I don' think this would achieve the effect I'm looking for.

My current alternative is to break Search into lots of smaller parallel jobs, each limited to say 2 minutes running. Thus even if 10 job were running these would stop and restart after 2 minutes and any Quicksearch jobs already queued would (hopefully) run before. The protocol is built to do this, but it’s not as effective / elegant as being able to reserve jobs / set a priority.

Thanks

Joe