For Teachers and Admins
Vocareum Lab Environments (Vocareum Notebook, Visual Studio Code labs, and JupyterLab labs) apply limits on processing resources and session duration. You can adjust some of these limits yourself, either across the whole course or for an individual assignment part. Other limits are managed by Vocareum and cannot be changed in the settings interface. To understand which limits fall into each tier and how they work, refer to the article: What are the Resource and Time Limits for Vocareum Labs?
This article covers the limits you control: the course-level fields under Other Settings and the settings on an assignment part. Before you begin, confirm that you have Teacher or Admin access to the course you want to change. To request a change to a Vocareum-managed limit, contact Vocareum Support.
Adjusting course-level limits
The course-level limits apply to every lab in the course. You adjust them under Course Settings, in the Other Settings section.
To adjust any of the course-level limits, follow these steps.
Open the course and go to Course Settings.
Select Other Settings from the settings menu.
In the CPU Limit (seconds) field, enter the processor time budget you want, in seconds.
In the Wall Clock Limit (seconds) field, enter the wall-clock time limit you want, in seconds.
In the Max Jupyter Notebook Size Before Warning (MB) field, enter the notebook file size, in megabytes, at which students receive a warning.
In the Lab Session Length (minutes) field, enter how long a lab session should run before it ends automatically, in minutes.
Select Save Course to apply your changes.
Adjusting part-level limits
Part-level limits apply only to a single assignment part. You adjust them on the part's Grading and Budget pages. The Grading page holds Max Grading Time, and the Budget page holds the time budget and session controls.
Setting the maximum grading time
Max Grading Time sets the processor time the grading job for this part may consume. To adjust it, follow these steps.
Open the assignment part you want to change and select the Grading page.
Under Grading Rules, enter a value in the Max Grading Time field, in seconds, up to the maximum of 1800 seconds.
Select Save Part to apply your change.
Setting the time budget and session limits
The Budget page holds the optional time budget and the session controls for the part. To adjust them, follow these steps.
Open the assignment part you want to change and select the Budget page.
Under Time Budget, turn on Monthly Time or Total Time and enter a value, in minutes, to cap how much lab time each user receives. Leave these off if you do not want a time budget.
Under Extensions, turn on the extensions toggle and configure Max Extension (maximum total extension time) and Time Per Extension (minutes added each time a student extends). Leave this off if you do not want students to be able to extend their session.
Under Terminate Resources, turn on Session Length and enter the session duration for this part, in minutes, to override the course-level Lab Session Length.
Select Save Part to apply your changes.
What to do if grading jobs time out
When a grading job stops before it finishes, the cause is usually the wall-clock time limit rather than the processor time limit. Student code is often slow or blocking without being processor-intensive, so most grading jobs that time out will reach the wall-clock time limit first.
Because Max Grading Time controls processor time only, raising it alone will not help if the grading job is stopping on wall-clock time.
To give grading jobs more wall-clock time, raise the course-level Wall Clock Limit (seconds) field under Other Settings, following the steps in the section above. Wall-clock time can be set only at the course level, so raising Wall Clock Limit affects every lab in the course.