How does Bamboo manage its build queue?

When a job is ready to run but no matching agent is free, it sits in the build queue rather than failing outright. Bamboo works through the queue roughly in order, dispatching each queued job to the first available agent whose capabilities satisfy that job's requirements.

A few factors affect how long something waits:

• Plan priority — plans can be weighted so more important pipelines get agents first when there's contention.
• Capability scarcity — a job needing a rare capability (a specific OS or license-bound tool) waits for one of the few agents that has it, even if generic agents are idle.
• Elastic capacity — if Elastic Bamboo is enabled, a growing queue can trigger new EC2 agents to spin up automatically, shortening the wait without manual intervention.

The Build Queue admin page shows exactly what's waiting and why, which is the first place to look when builds feel slow to start rather than slow to run.

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