# Usage & Fair-Share

reading your fair-share score, what it means for scheduling

# Understanding Your Fair-Share Score

Fair-share is Slurm's mechanism for balancing cluster access across all users and groups. Your fair-share score determines your job priority in the queue relative to other users.

## How fair-share works

Every user and account is allocated a **target share** of the cluster — a fraction of the total resources they are expected to use over time. Slurm tracks actual usage and compares it to the target:

- If you have used **less** than your share, your priority is **higher** — your jobs start sooner.
- If you have used **more** than your share, your priority is **lower** — other users' jobs take precedence.

Usage decays over time, so a period of heavy use does not permanently lower your priority. The decay window on this cluster is set by HPC staff.

## Viewing your fair-share

1. Click **Usage** in the navbar.
2. The page shows your current fair-share score, your account's usage, and how you compare to other users in your group.

## Improving your priority

- **Wait** — priority increases naturally as past usage decays.
- **Use less** — avoid requesting more CPUs, memory, or time than your job actually needs. Over-requesting counts as usage even if the resources sit idle.
- **Request accurate time limits** — a job that requests 24 hours but finishes in 2 hours still accrues 2 hours of usage, but an accurate time limit helps the scheduler backfill other jobs around yours, which benefits everyone.

## Checking from the command line

```bash
sshare -u $USER
```

The `FairShare` column shows your current score. A value close to 1.0 means you are under your target share (high priority); close to 0.0 means you are over it (low priority).