Raphael:

Thanks for becoming involved!

It’s super-frustrating that some of the tests on Jenkins do (or do not) 
reproduce, even if you “beast” them. Hoss’ reports come from many different 
environments, from Windows to various Java releases to… So “does it fail 
locally” is a tricky question. Plus, many of the intermittent failures are 
timing-related, so the speed of your local machine, the other tasks running on 
your machine etc. can be a factor.

What I do is use Mark Miller’s “beast” script. See: 
https://gist.github.com/markrmiller/dbdb792216dc98b018ad

Two important parameters to the script above are
- how many separate tests you want to run in parallel. This helps when the 
failures are timing-related
- how many iterations of the tests you want to run. Each test puts its output 
in a separate subdirectory, so when a test fails you have the full logs in the 
corresponding subdirectory.

Then I run the failing test over and over and over. If I can get it to fail 
(and if you’re getting 0.5% failures, it’s _really_ hit or miss) then I can 
diagnose the logs in the appropriate directory, possibly add logging and run it 
all again.

Unfortunately, for intermittently-failing tests, you never _quite_ know if 
you’ve fixed the problem because your 10,000 iterations may have just lucked 
out.

Welcome to the joys of distributed computing ;)

Best,
Erick

> On Nov 8, 2019, at 5:31 PM, Raphael Bircher <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi all
> 
> In my welcome thread, Jason pointed me to Hoss's Jenkins failure page. I 
> think this is a good point to start for me. I like to help you tracking down 
> this inconsistent failures. At first, please, if I got something wrong, 
> correct me!
> 
> As far as I understand, there are tests in Jenkins who sometimes fail, and 
> sometimes not. It looks like nobody really know why. right?
> 
> So I need some information from you. First of all. Do you see the same 
> behavior, if you do the test locally. First I want to exclude that the bug is 
> within the Jenkins system.
> 
> Are there bugs who are possibly related to the tests in question?
> 
> When this behavior was first detected?
> 
> This is it for the start. Thanks for your help and your information
> 
> Regards, Raphael
> 
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