On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 10:47 PM, Gregory Szorc <g...@mozilla.com> wrote: > Is there a tracking bug for areas where we could gain efficiency? We all > know the build phase is full of clownshoes. But, I believe we also do silly > things like execute some tests serially, only taking advantage of 1/N CPU > cores in the process. This is just wasting resources. See [1] for a concrete > example.
Don't we execute *all* tests serially? Many of our tests require focus, so you can't do two runs in parallel on the same desktop. In theory we could specially flag the ones that don't need focus, and make sure to always run them without focus -- that would probably be most of the tests. Then those could be run in parallel. They could also be run in the background on developer machines, which would be nice. This would require a bunch of developer work. Alternatively, the test machines could be set up with multiple desktops with independent focus. At least Windows and Linux should support this, AFAIK -- it's necessary if you want to allow a thin-client setup in corporate environments. This would require a bunch of IT work. (I don't think xvfb-run is a good solution, because it's not exactly the same as a normal X session. In my experience, a small fraction of tests unexpectedly fail using xvfb-run. By the same token, I'm guessing some will incorrectly pass. It doesn't seem like a good idea to use a different environment for test machines than users will use, if we can avoid it.) _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
