[Box-Admins] Re: Squeak Benchmarks Process Priority

[Frank Shearar]

On 7 March 2013 08:21, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07 Mar 2013, at 7:48, Ken Causey <ken at kencausey.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>
> Levente's script polls every 15 mins so at most this could run something like 24*3 times in a day. But typically the commits occur in chunks, so I reckon 10 times in a day would be a wonderful problem to have.

Apparently I need a new prescription for my glasses: the benchmarks
take 2.5 minutes to run, not 38 seconds.

frank