multiple slave processes on jenkins slave machine

Question

I have a master and multiple slave machines. The slaves are configured to start via ssh from the master. Initially, there is a single java process running the slave.jar. Occasionally, I'll login to a slave and find that there are 2 or even sometimes 3 java processes running slave.jar. This is while no jobs are running.

How many slave processes should be running when the slave is idle?

tomcat   54054 53913  0 Sep02 ?        00:00:00 bash -c cd "/var/hudson" && java  -jar slave.jar
tomcat   54055 53914  0 Sep02 ?        00:00:00 bash -c cd "/var/hudson" && java  -jar slave.jar
tomcat   54080 54054  1 Sep02 ?        01:11:45 java -jar slave.jar
tomcat   54081 54055  2 Sep02 ?        01:44:17 java -jar slave.jar

i just have one slave process running, regardless of the number of executors doing work on the agent. — burnettk
I have two slave.jar running on my box.I have reconnected the slave but again two process started on the slave. — devops
@devops I have two process too, they run nearly the same command, but I cannot get any description about why. — soolaugust

Stefan Bicher Stefan Bicher · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-09T08:58:42

I had the same problem... and recognized after hours(!) of investigation, that our backup system (master) was online and connected to the same slaves (a backup was installed there for test reasons).

Each time-triggered build was triggered nearly at the same time and failed completetly randomly in about a third of the builds jobs executed.

So perhaps there's really another master connecting to your slaves?

multiple slave processes on jenkins slave machine

1 Answers