On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 7:10 AM, James Graham <ja...@hoppipolla.co.uk> wrote: > > So, as far as I can tell that the heart of the problem is that the > end-to-end time for the build+test infrastructure is unworkably slow. I > understand that waiting half a dozen hours — a significant fraction of a > work day — for a try run is considered normal. This has a huge knock-on > effect e.g. it requires people to context switch away from one problem > whilst they wait, and context switch back into it once they have the > results. Presumably it also encourages landing changes without proper > testing, which increases the backout rate. It seems that this will cost a > great deal not just in terms of compute hours (which are easy to measure) > but also in terms of developer productivity (which is harder to measure, but > could be even more significant).
Context-switching is inevitable. Even a miraculous 10x improvement in try run speed would still require, say 30 minutes of waiting. Even waiting 5 minutes for a build requires context switching. It's a skill every Mozilla developer has to learn. I know it's not ideal, but there's no alternative. Semi-relatedly, I endorse sfink's suggestion about T-shaped pushes, i.e. those ones where you build on all platforms and run the full test suite on a single platform. Linux test times are usually good, so |try: -b do -p all -u all[x64] -t none| is often a good option. Nick _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
