Re: Cirrus-ci is lowering free CI cycles - what to do with cfbot, etc?

Hi,

On 2023-08-08 18:34:58 +0200, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> On 2023-Aug-08, Andres Freund wrote:
>
> > Given the cost of macos, it seems like it'd be by far the most of affordable
> > to just buy 1-2 mac minis (2x ~660USD) and stick them in a shelf somewhere, as
> > persistent runners. Cirrus has builtin macos virtualization support - but can
> > only host two VMs on each mac, due to macos licensing restrictions. A single
> > mac mini would suffice to keep up with our unoptimized monthly runtime
> > (although there likely would be some overhead).
>
> If using persistent workers is an option, maybe we should explore that.
> I think we could move all or some of the Linux - Debian builds to
> hardware that we already have in shelves (depending on how much compute
> power is really needed.)

(76+830+860+935)/((365/12)*24) = 3.7

3.7 instances with 4 "vcores" are busy 100% of the time. So we'd need at least
~16 cpu threads - I think cirrus sometimes uses instances that disable HT, so
it'd perhaps be 16 cores actually.

> I think using other OSes is more difficult, mostly because I doubt we
> want to deal with licenses; but even FreeBSD might not be a realistic
> option, at least not in the short term.

They can be VMs, so that shouldn't be a big issue.

> > task_name | sum
> > ------------------------------------------------+------------
> > FreeBSD - 13 - Meson | 1017:56:09
> > Windows - Server 2019, MinGW64 - Meson | 00:00:00
> > SanityCheck | 76:48:41
> > macOS - Ventura - Meson | 873:12:43
> > Windows - Server 2019, VS 2019 - Meson & ninja | 1251:08:06
> > Linux - Debian Bullseye - Autoconf | 830:17:26
> > Linux - Debian Bullseye - Meson | 860:37:21
> > CompilerWarnings | 935:30:35
> > (8 rows)
> >
>
> moving just Debian, that might alleviate 76+830+860+935 hours from the
> Cirrus infra, which is ~46%. Not bad.
>
>
> (How come Windows - Meson reports allballs?)

It's mingw64, which we've marked as "manual", because we didn't have the cpu
cycles to run it.

Greetings,

Andres Freund