Re: Reducing buildfarm disk usage: remove temp installs when done

On 01/18/2015 05:48 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> One of the biggest causes of buildfarm run failures is "out of disk
> space". That's not just because people are running buildfarm critters
> on small slow machines; it's because "make check-world" is an enormous
> space hog. Some numbers from current HEAD:
>
> clean source tree: 120MB
> built source tree: 400MB
> tree after make check-world: 3GB
>
> (This is excluding ~250MB for one's git repo.)
>
> The reason for all the bloat is the temporary install trees that we
> create, which tend to eat up about 100MB apiece, and there are dozens
> of them (eg, one per testable contrib module). Those don't get removed
> until the end of the test run, so the usage is cumulative.
>
> The attached proposed patch removes each temp install tree as soon as
> we're done with it, in the normal case where no error was detected.
> This brings the peak space usage down from ~3GB to ~750MB.
>
> To make things better in the buildfarm, we'd have to back-patch this into
> all active branches, but I don't see any big problem with doing so.
>
> Any objections?
>
>

I don't have an issue, but you should be aware that the buildfarm
doesn't in fact run "make check-world", and it doesn't to a test install
for each contrib module, since it runs "installcheck", not "check" for
those. It also cleans up some data directories as it goes.

cheers

andrew