[Box-Admins] Re: Squeak Benchmarks Process Priority

[Ken Causey]

On 03/07/2013 01:26 AM, Frank Shearar wrote:
> On 7 March 2013 02:52, Ken Causey<ken at kencausey.com>  wrote:
>> On 03/06/2013 03:57 PM, Frank Shearar wrote:
>>>
>>> On 6 March 2013 21:37, Jeff Gonis<jeff.gonis at gmail.com>   wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi Frank,
>>>>
>>>> So to my chagrin the performance tests on Squeak-CI are pretty much
>>>> worse than useless, displaying up to a 100% difference in times
>>>> between builds.  For my part I am looking into the SMark framework
>>>> that Stefan Marr offered and working to learn that and see how I could
>>>> use it.
>>>>
>>>> But I was curious if there were some other steps I could take in the
>>>> meantime to try and get the times to be a little more repeatable.  The
>>>> first thing that comes to mind is that we "nice" the vm with I believe
>>>> the default value before running it for both the tests and the
>>>> benchmarks, I don't know how to log into the server Jenkins is running
>>>> on so I can't see what the default value of nice is, but I am assuming
>>>> it is 0 as that seems fairly standard. Do you think it would be
>>>> reasonable to try out a high-priority value for at least the
>>>> benchmarks portion of the SqueakTrunk build.  Fire off the benchmarks
>>>> at a -20 priority and see if we can get some repeatability?
>>>>
>>>> I am not sure about the impacts this might have elsewhere, which is
>>>> why I wanted to run it by you before sending a pull request.  If there
>>>> is some other easy win that I have overlooked that leaps to mind
>>>> please let me know, otherwise I will keep plugging away with SMark,
>>>> and also look into running the tests multiple times to warm up Cog.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for your help,
>>>> Jeff G.
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Jeff,
>>>
>>> The box-admins folk might have further insight, but I think renicing
>>> to be hardcore might be the sensible thing. The performance tests
>>> don't run for long, and would only run with the SqueakTrunk build, so
>>> shouldn't impact too much on things... but I don't recall what other
>>> services run on that box.
>>>
>>> frank
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Please define clearly "don't run for long".  At the moment only Jenkins is
>> running on that server so in the short run at most, it would impact Jenkins.
>> However it the not too distant future the mailing lists will be on that
>> server and while a little delay is no big deal I would like some idea how
>> much before saying "OK".
>
> I don't have a trend, but the last build spent 38 seconds running the
> performance tests. Compared to the time taken to possibly compile a
> VM, update an image, and run the tests, the benchmarking's peanuts, at
> least for now.
>
> frank

OK, I guess probably anything up to 5-10 minutes of 'very busy' time is 
probably OK.  I'm assuming this is a once a day task.  As it gets longer 
we may just want to consider scheduling it at otherwise 'quiet' times.

Ken