Removal of the scratch-path option in load balanced Workbench clusters

You may have noticed the release notes for the 2023.03 and later versions of Workbench contain the following:

• When the Job Launcher is enabled, the Local plugin can now be configured to use “external” load balancing, which removes the need for the scratch-path to be on shared storage (rstudio/launcher#42, rstudio/rstudio-pro#3770)

The link for this can be found here:

https://docs.posit.co/ide/news/#posit-workbench

What does this mean?

Previously, load balancing with Local Launcher required the use of an NFS shared directory for the Local Launcher nodes to discover each other. This change adds a new external balancing method that Workbench will use to provide information about nodes that are available in a cluster. This allows us to reuse all of the existing discovery mechanisms in Workbench nodes without having to duplicate this logic or add database support to the Local Launcher.

Please note that you will need to still keep the launcher.local.conf file,  This means that you will need to edit your /etc/rstudio/launcher.local.conf configuration file to contain the below. 

# /etc/rstudio/launcher.local.conf
#scratch-path=/mnt/rstudio-server/Local
load-balancer-preference=external

From there, a restart of the Workbench and launcher services is required:

sudo rstudio-server restart

sudo rstudio-launcher restart

 
More information on this can be found here:
https://docs.posit.co/ide/server-pro/job_launcher/local_plugin.html#configuration

Support Ticket

If you still have issues after completing the above, you can always lodge a support ticket, where our group of friendly, and incredibly knowledgeable staff can assist with any issues that you may be having. You can submit a ticket here:

https://support.posit.co/hc/en-us/requests/new