We typically use a safe-restart after updating Jenkins and its plugins to the latest and greatest. This freezes our executors and prevents any new jobs from starting while waiting patiently for existing jobs to finish. This is a great feature, and much easier than watching the queue and restarting by hand when safe.

However, we have some jobs that typically last 25-40 minutes and a few intense tasks which can last longer than 1 hour. Triggering a safe-restart while one of these jobs are running can block progress for much longer than we'd prefer, and we often have to cancel the safe-restart to allow other (faster and higher-priority) jobs to execute.

I would like to request a 'nice-restart' feature which, like safe-restart, will only act when the executors are free and no builds are running. Unlike safe-restart, this mode will let new jobs trigger and execute as normal while it waits patiently for a completely free build queue.

This would allow our Tools team to perform low-priority upgrades at our convenience without delaying high-priority build tasks the Dev team depends on.