Re: reducing isolation tests runtime

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> writes:
> On the subject of test total time, we could paralelize isolation tests.
> Right now "make check" in src/test/isolation takes 1:16 on my machine.
> Test "timeouts" takes full 40s of that, with nothing running in parallel
> -- the machine is completely idle.

BTW, one small issue there is that the reason the timeouts test is so
slow is that we have to use multi-second timeouts to be sure slower
buildfarm critters (eg valgrind animals) will get the expected results.
So I'm worried that if the machine isn't otherwise idle, we will get
random failures.

We could parallelize the rest of those tests and leave timeouts in its own
group. That cuts the payback a lot :-( but might still be worth doing.
Or maybe tweak things so that the buildfarm runs a serial schedule but
manual testing doesn't. Or we could debate how important the timeout
tests really are ... or think harder about how to make them reproducible.

regards, tom lane