Re: Making testing on Windows easier

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 1:00 PM, Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> 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.

FYI, in my experience VC++ is typically much faster than GCC, on
comparable hardware - particularly with C++.

> 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.

It should be trivial to script I would think - it's a one-liner to
create an instance with ec2 tools.

> 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.

Full vs. para-virtualisation perhaps?

--
Dave Page
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