Re: Making testing on Windows easier

On 01/21/2013 08:55 PM, Noah Misch wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 10:01:29AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
>> I've found EC2 to be unusably slow for Windows builds, with a medium
>> instance taking an hour and a half to do a simple build and "vcregress
>> check". They're also restrictive in disk space terms, so you land up
>> needing to add a second EBS volume.
> Yikes. The "build DEBUG" step takes 5-7 minutes for me; I use EBS-optimized
> m1.xlarge spot instances in US East (lately about US$0.19/hr). Fairly sure I
> once used a c1.medium, though, and it still took <10 minutes. I don't know
> why your experience has been so different.
I was using m1.medium instances, but the same instance type gets Linux
builds done in 15-20 mins. Slow, but not that slow. Performance was
consistently miserable across several instances, including one full
clean rebuild from scratch. Weird.

I should perhaps give the bigger instances a go. Unfortunately Jenkins
can't auto-start and auto-stop Windows instances yet and I don't have
time to improve the Jenkins ec2 plugin right now, so using any instance
bigger than an m1.medium would pretty much require manually stopping and
starting it for builds. Yick.

Instead I'm using my home media PC, a Pentium G630 (like a cut-down Core
2 i3) with a laptop hard drive. It completes builds in 20 minutes. My
more power-hungry laptop does it in 7.

I was never able to determine why the Windows instances were so much
slower than the corresponding Linux instance of the same type.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services