Started by timer, but waiting for what?

Dear Reader,

[CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise 2.319.3.4-rolling]

I’m new to Jenkins and I’m trying to understand what the system is doing during the “Started by Timer” and “Still waiting to schedule task”. Sometimes this takes up to a minute but most times it only takes seconds. I’m looking for a (deep) tech explanation if possible. What are those “pending items” ?

The one minute wait looks like this:

09:44:00  Started by timer
09:44:00  [Pipeline] Start of Pipeline
09:44:00  [Pipeline] node
09:44:58  Still waiting to schedule task
09:44:58  Waiting for pending items to get a node assigned

The seconds wait looks like this:

08:14:00  Started by timer
08:14:00  [Pipeline] Start of Pipeline
08:14:00  [Pipeline] node
08:14:04  Running on *host* in E:\DEV...

Regards,
Wim

Hello @wimkerstens and welcome to this community. :wave:

If you’re using Jenkins Enterprise, do you have support with CloudBees?

I, unfortunately, know nothing about what hides behind those “pending items”. :person_shrugging: