put a copy of the "Start/stop" all projects buttons at the top of the assignments page in a course, to greatly speed up grading

[williamstein]

This would make it so opening a project takes about 1s for the random instructor (with no idle timeout upgrades) instead of possibly 15s or more, hence saving a lot of time and frustration when they are grading.

[williamstein]

I wrote grading above, but it's really to speed up browsing what students are doing. Grading happens entirely in the one single instructor project.

[novoselt]

If technically possible (I think so) I would add this button next to course tabs, i.e. Students/Assignments/Handouts - probably to the right from them, with title "Start all" (why do we need Stop?) and a tooltip that explains what it does, WHY the instructor should press it, and maybe some warning for not abusing it.

This does not come up in support, but I think it also cannot come from people not familiar with how CoCalc works internally. They are just silently frustrated, that it is slow.

[williamstein]

(why do we need Stop?)

Some reasons:

• the instructor may want to make sure projects from a course aren't being used by students, e.g., for an exam when they want to make all the students use a different project.
• this makes it possible to restart the projects, e.g., if something new is installed or changed (e.g., custom env variables, pip install something via the terminal, etc.). If there was no stop, there would be no way to restart.

That doesn't mean Stop needs to be at the top. It just needs to be somewhere.