I'm thinking that adding a "priority" attribute to
hudson.model.Queue.WaitingItem would be a good way to deal with this. The
comparator could look at priority before looking at timestamp. Priority could
be "Held", "Low", "Normal", and "High" and default to "Normal". Various
functions could increase or decrease the priority of a job.

I'm going to try doing this.

If you do this, I'd encourage you to use AJAX D&D reordering, as opposed to
additional button.

Given the relative unimportance of the feature (sorry), it would be better not
to clutter the UI.

If you have a large number of queued up jobs, you really should just add more
slaves.

Based on the recent discussion of swappable queue implementations, etc., I'm
going to put this back to be worked on later in a more coordinated effort.

Throwing in my $.02: We have a case where most of the time we have plenty of executors, but every few days we integrate changes to the build tools in the source repo, usually after hours, and the result is that nearly everything rebuilds. So this takes a couple of hours, and occasionally someone needs to get a build triggered and through the system when this is happening. Being able to expedite a particular build would be handy.

I think the priority plugin has the potential to fix this: http://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-8275 , but I thought I'd chime in here too.

I'll put a comment here instead of creating a new issue or renaming this one right away, but shouldn't this really read: "Allow for rearranging / editing the build queue"? (Note: I've not found any other current issue than this one here.)

That is – and I think this is an extremely "natural" requirement for people who's build queue is full regularly – what we need is for the build queue to be "editable": Move waiting jobs around arbitrarily. (And I think the Priority Sorter Plugin should only determine the inital sort order.)

This feature would be very helpful for our scenario. It is really annoying if one has to either wait for other projects to be build first or need to stop them and thus breaking the usual code checking functionality of the build server.

There are some situations like developing/debugging the build of the server itself or using the artifacts of the project as an urgent release where this feature would be really nice.

Adding more slaves is reducing the problem but not really solving (at least for numSlaves < numProjects).

I think that this feature request is now in the Accelerated Build Now plugin, which is available in your Jenkins update center.

The plugin's page is at:
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Accelerated+Build+Now+Plugin