In my Jenkins server, I sometimes have a little bit of queueing and you'll see messages like this in a pipeline which has recently been submitted:

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Still waiting to schedule task Waiting for next available executor on ip-172-31-141-11.us-west-2.compute.internal

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I use node labels in order to select which agents may be used. However, the above message suggests to me that the Jenkins pipeline runner makes a selection as to which agent will receive the job at the moment it encounters the node() command in my Jenkinsfile.

The reason that I believe this logic to be flawed is that the particular node in question (ip-172-31-141-11.us-west-2.compute.internal) might get killed off while the current job is running which suggests that my queued job will be stuck waiting forever because there is almost no chance that AWS will relaunch the same node with the same hostname.

A better strategy would be one in which I request a node via something like node("mac") and then jenkins tells me that its waiting to schedule an executor on the next node labeled "mac" as opposed to selecting an individual machine which might go away.