An interesting question came across the AnthillPro mailing list a few days ago: How do you put in place a quote that limits how many builds and tests a single developer can currently run in our build farm? When builds/tests are somewhat costly, it’s reasonable to want to keep individuals from monopolizing a shared pool of machines.

In AnthillPro, the ideal way of restricting access to some resource is with a lock. Usually, a lock represents a shared resource like a database, or network deployer that can only be used by one (or a handful) of processes at a time. In this case, what was needed was a restriction to “my current processes”.

What ended up working was creating an AnthillPro “Lockable Resource” per user. Each user could then be assigned an individual maximum number of current workflows to execute. The build and test workflows are then assigned a scripted resource lookup:

The script would be something like:

return BuildRequestLookup.getCurrent().getRequesterName() + "-quota";