Hello!
OnJobFailed should trigger whenever tasks fail as well as when jobs fail based on this bit in the docs. So with your existing snippet you should be in a good place to fire whenever a job or task error. I think that means we can avoid worrying about point #2 for now.
But just for future readers sake, any notable slowness for #2 would be happening in the script not in Deadline. So if it’s really easy to bail out (say you check the plugin type before doing the hard work) you’re in good shape. In this case, having to loop through the reports to find specific strings is going to be a bit slower. How much slower? That’s a bit harder to answer, as it comes down to how many reports to go through, how long each report is and how efficient the python is. And I can’t guess what that looks like in ‘seconds-on-the-clock’ slowness.
And someone in here was working on something sort of similar over in this thread, which might be something you’re interested in: Timeout limit lowers the priority job when reached. Is that possible?
Hopefully that’s shed some helpful light!