Last sprint the buildbot got overwhelmed with a giant backlog of runs and became essentially useless for the duration of the sprint. Jean-Paul had two suggestions:
- Don't commit to trunk during the sprint, even if your branch was approved; wait until the sprint is over so trunk commits are spread out.
- If you're just doing some initial cross-platform testing using force-builds.py, use the command line option that lets you run only some of the tests (e.g. "twisted.web" or "twisted.python.test.test_versions") instead of running the whole test suite.
In an attempt to mitigate this problem, since pre-commit testing is a (the?) major bottleneck that we have at sprints, I will be bringing a nice fast machine with virtual machines for at least one flavor of each of our major supported platforms (OS X, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD). I still need to install some dependencies, but hopefully I can do some whole-suite pre-commit verification for other reviewers who are there.
Hopefully the keyboard won't get too hot for me to type on :-).
For the next sprint, our BuildBot maintainer has assured me that he'll be moving the build master infrastructure to a faster machine before then, so that hopefully it will cope better with the increased load of a sprint.
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