How to get an accurate elapsed time of jobs

Users/Site Administrators
1

Hello All,

I wonder where can I get the accurate elapsed time of a job.
(or a real end time of a job. if I can get the real end time, I can use job_endtime - job_starttime as the job’s elapsed time)

After submitting array job in PBS, I execute qdel some of the subjobs before they are finished.
I expected those cancelled subjobs should have a eariler mtime.(I use qstat -xf as the query command)
But when all of the subjobs are finished, the jobs those I cancelled get the same mtime with other subjobs.

look forward the reply. Thank you very much.

2

In general, not from the pbs attributes, within your script you can have

echo “start ---- $(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)”
main_execution_script(s)
echo “end — $(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)”

3

I think resources_used.walltime should work … you can also look at a job’s end time from its accounting log E record, the field “end” stores the timestamp for when it ended … there’s a different E record printed for each subjob so you can also use the timestamp of the E record itself

4

thank you so much. but the job scripts are written by someone else. I cannot rely on the jobs’ log.

5

Thank you very much.

  1. resources_used.walltime is not exist in subjobs output. it seems the walltime only displayed in normally finished subjobs.
  2. I think accounting seems more suitable for me. Next I will work on how to get the accounting log. maybe I need to install some necessary package. Now it seems no command like qacct or pbs_accounting on my server.
6

You can look into execjob_epilogue and execjob_prologue hooks

The accounting logs are created in openpbs at this location $PBS_HOME/server_priv/accounting/YYYYMMDD

The accounting logs are human readable text files.

Please let us know the version of openpbs you are running.