Re: Testing the async-commit patch

Tom Lane wrote:
> But to get to the point: the urgency of testing the patch more
> extensively has just moved up a full order of magnitude, IMHO anyway.
> I muttered something in the other thread about providing a buildfarm
> option to run the regression tests with synchronous_commit off. That
> would still be a good idea in the long run, but I want to take some more
> drastic measures now. I propose that we actually set synchronous_commit
> off by default for the next little while --- at least up to 8.3beta1,
> maybe until we approach the RC point. That will ensure that every
> buildfarm machine is exercising the async-commit behavior, as well as
> every developer who's testing HEAD.
>
> Of course the risk is that we might forget to turn it back on before
> release :-(
>
>
>

Turn it off, I doubt we'll forget.

I have some ideas about testing configuration items. Doing all our tests
with the default config is not ideal, I think. Essentially we'd put up a
server that would have sets of <branch, list-of-config-lines>. The
client would connect to the server if it could and get the set(s) of
lines for the branch on question, and for each set it would try another
run of installcheck (I'm also wondering if we should switch to doing
installcheck-parallel). Anyway, this would be a config option on the
buildfarm, so we wouldn't overburden hosts with limited run windows
(e.g. the Solaris boxes Sun has on the farm) or slow run times (e.g.
some of the old and/or tiny hardware we have).

If this seems worth it I'll put it on my TODO.

cheers

andrew