Nelson Beebe reported that the backref-multibyte-slow test was failing. From his log, where I saw max_seconds=1, and the following timeout 1s ... timed out.
I concluded that something (load on the underlying system, disk/kernel latency) caused that final grep to take far more wall-clock time than the former one. This would be expected if some other build/test were running concurrently. To work around that, I've written the attached: when the timeout would be just 1s, increase it to 3. In coreutils tests (because there are so many, and some were so abusive, and running them in parallel...), we ended up increasing most timeouts to 10s, but for now, that seems like it'd be overkill here. I have so far been able to reproduce that failure, so the above is just an educated guess. If someone can reproduce the failure and test the patch, that'd be great.
grep-unwarranted-failure-of-backref-multibyte-slow.diff
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