Temporal distribution issue

(imported topic written by James99801)

When I set a staggered start time for actions, all of my clients seem to pick the same time to start.

So for example, if I have 60 clients and tell the action to stagger the start time over 60 minutes I would expect that on average one client per minute would start its download.

What I see in practice is that one or two clients will download sometime within the hour, while the remaining 58 clients all wait 59 minutes and then download at once.

This isn’t particularly useful, as I could just set the start time and forget the temporal distribution.

I’m in that situation right now – I have 255 clients waiting to download a patch, with a staggered start time of 240 minutes. An hour into my 240 minute staggered time, I can’t find one client that has started to download. I would expect to see about 25% of them having at least started to download by now, and an hour of my download window has been wasted.

In order to avoid the 239 minute rush, is there a way to tell clients to stop waiting and go ahead and download? Then at least I could run down the list and manually distribute the start time.

I’m running 8.2.1364 on the server and clients.

(imported comment written by James99801)

I killed the job 237 minutes into my 240 minute staggered start time. All 255 clients trying to pull the patch at once would have been troublesome.

I guess that switch does not do what I thought it did.

How you get the clients to space out their download activity to take pressure off of the network?