It used to be that you had to pay for vCenter, to get deep insights into VM 
performance. But ‘esxtop' is certainly a great starting point. And perhaps it 
does provide enough info, to get an idea of where time is being spent.

> On 2021-05-17-M, at 02:55, Daniel J. Luke <dl...@geeklair.net> wrote:
> 
> I'm not an ESXi expert but after a quick look through some of their 
> documentation it looks like there's an `esxtop` command that can show some 
> information. More info here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1005362 (some 
> google searches seem to indicate that when the oversubscription is a problem, 
> it's usually because ESXi is waiting for 'enough' cores to be available to 
> start all of the vCPUs - and that this used to be much worse in older ESXi 
> versions, but can still be a problem). This post also has information that 
> looks useful: https://www.heroix.com/blog/vmware-vcpu-over-allocation/ 
> <https://www.heroix.com/blog/vmware-vcpu-over-allocation/>

Ryan, you’re right, it wasn’t bad before. And let me clarify that none of my 
comments were meant to criticize our setup; rather, I’m simply trying to 
provide some ideas to potentially improve build times.

However, things have definitely slowed down with one of the Xserve’s out of the 
mix. And if we could get back to four, with builders spread evenly amongst the 
hardware, that would help.

As for overcommitment: I’m simply suggesting that we reduce the number of vCPUs 
per builder, from eight to six. Otherwise, the formula MacPorts base uses to 
calculate builds jobs and such is fine as-is, and I’m not advocating that we 
change it.

> On 2021-05-16-S, at 15:38, Ryan Schmidt <ryandes...@macports.org> wrote:
> 
>> So we need to do something, as the buildbots simply can’t keep up.
> 
> I think they've been keeping up fine, except when a bunch of huge things need 
> to be built, which I find understandable.
> 
>> Upgrading them to six-core Xeons would absolutely help, for sure. But I’m 
>> quite certain that we could also improve the situation, by reducing the 
>> level of CPU overcommitment. And reducing the vCPUs per VM would help, as we 
>> simply don’t have the physical CPU power to support eight/VM.
> 
> When you say reduce CPU overcommitment, by what means are you referring to, 
> other than reducing CPUs per VM?

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