Monitoring Progress

After submitting a job, you land on the status page at /jobs/<job_id>/. It auto-refreshes every 5 seconds and shows where the job is in the pipeline.

The pipeline indicator

PocketDock's pipeline has four steps. Each is shown as a circle that progresses from pending → active → completed:

#	Step	What's happening
1	Pocket Detection	P2Rank analyzes the protein surface and ranks druggable pockets
2	Structure Preparation	Meeko converts the protein and ligand into Vina-ready PDBQT format
3	Docking	AutoDock Vina runs once per pocket, generating up to 9 ranked poses each
4	Results Ready	Files written, database updated, page redirects automatically

Visual states:

• Gray — pending (not started yet).
• Blue, pulsing — actively running.
• Green checkmark — completed.
• Red — the pipeline failed at this step.

Job details panel

Below the pipeline indicator, the status page shows the parameters the job was submitted with:

• Protein filename
• Ligand filename
• Number of pockets to dock
• Vina exhaustiveness

These are read-only — to change them, submit a new job.

Queue position when pending

If your job is still pending (not yet picked up by a worker), the status page additionally shows a Queue position panel: how many jobs are ahead of yours in line, and an estimated wait until your job starts.

The estimate assumes the worker concurrency configured via WORKER_CONCURRENCY (default 2) and uses a rolling average of the last 20 completed jobs as the per-job duration. See Queue for the full formula and limitations.

The panel disappears as soon as your job moves to a running stage — at that point the pipeline indicator above tells you everything you need.

Polling and auto-redirect

The status page reloads itself every 5 seconds (using a meta-refresh, not JavaScript polling — works even with JS disabled). Behind the scenes:

• If status is still running_* or pending, the page just refreshes.
• If status becomes completed, the browser is redirected to the results view of the same URL.
• If status becomes failed, the page renders an error banner with the failure message.

If you want to poll programmatically instead, use the API.

Failures

When the pipeline fails, the status page shows a red banner with the error message captured from the failing stage. Common causes are documented in Troubleshooting:

• P2Rank found no pockets — the protein may have no predicted druggable site; try a different chain or structure.
• Failed to prepare receptor / ligand — file format or chemistry issue.
• Vina failed on a pocket — not fatal; the pipeline continues with the remaining pockets and only that pocket is missing from the results.

Errors are truncated to 2000 characters and stored on the DockingJob record — they're available via the status API as well.

How long should a job take?

A rough guide for default settings (exhaustiveness=8, 3 pockets):

Protein size	Ligand size	Expected runtime
Small (~150 residues)	Small (~20 heavy atoms)	2–4 min
Medium (~300 residues)	Medium (~30 heavy atoms)	4–8 min
Large (~500+ residues)	Large (~50 heavy atoms)	8–15 min

Doubling exhaustiveness roughly doubles the docking time. The hard ceiling is the Celery task time limit of 3600 seconds (configurable; see Configuration).

Sharing a job

The job URL — http://<your-host>/jobs/<job_id>/ — is permanent and unauthenticated. Anyone with the URL can view the status and (when complete) the results. There is no "delete" button in the UI; jobs persist until manually removed from the database and media/ directory.