Re: Sending out a request for more buildfarm animals?

On 6.5.2014 23:01, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> On 6.5.2014 22:24, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Tomas Vondra <tv(at)fuzzy(dot)cz> writes:
>>> I recall there was a call for more animals with CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS
>>> some time ago, so I went and enabled that on all three animals. Let's
>>> see how long that will take.
>>
>>> I see there are more 'clobber' options in the code: CLOBBER_FREED_MEMORY
>>> and CLOBBER_CACHE_RECURSIVELY. Would that be a good idea to enable these
>>> as well?
>>
>>> The time requirements will be much higher (especially for the
>>> RECURSIVELY option), but running that once a week shouldn't be a big
>>> deal - the machine is pretty much dedicated to the buildfarm.
>>
>> I've never had the patience to run the regression tests to completion
>> with CLOBBER_CACHE_RECURSIVELY at all, let alone do it on a regular
>> basis. (I wonder if there's some easy way to run it for just a few
>> regression tests...)
>
> Now, that's a challenge ;-)
>
>>
>> I think testing CLOBBER_FREED_MEMORY would be sensible though.
>
> OK, I've enabled this for now.

Hmmmm, with CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS + CLOBBER_FREED_MEMORY the tests take
~20h on a single branch/animal. With a single locale (e.g. "C") it would
take ~4h, but we're testing a bunch of additional czech/slovak locales.

The tests are running in sequence (magpie->treepie->fulmar) so with all
6 branches, this would take ~14 days to complete. I don't mind the
machine is running tests 100% of the time, that's why it's in buildfarm,
but I'd rather see the failures soon after the commit (and two weeks is
well over the "soon" edge, IMHO).

So I'm thinking about how to improve this. I'd like to keep the options
for all the branches (e.g. not just HEAD, as a few other animals do).
But I'm thinking about running the tests in parallel, somehow - the
machine has 4 cores, and most of the time only one of them is used. I
don't expect a perfect ~3x speedup, but getting ~2x would be nice.

Any recommendations how to do that? I see there's 'base_port' in the
config - is it enough to tweak this, or do I need to run separate the
animals using e.g. lxc?

regards
Tomas