ovirt-engine Ci is very very slow - hard to merge patches

[David Caro]

There's not much we can do if we don't change the way we work, as you should
know, most of the patches are sent during the same days just before the
release, that is a huge temporal overload of the system, and even if we can
alleviate it a bit (we are working on that too) there's no easy way we can
adapt to such a high load increase.

Though, in any case, you can (as maintainer) set the CI+1 flag yourself and
merge, I agree that we should be able to test everything that goes in the
branch before merging.

One way to reduce exponentially the workload would be to do the merges to
master in batches, that requires a bit of extra work on the developer side, let
me explain (just a random not really though through proposal):

* The developer works on a temporary personal branch, there he creates a lot of
  patches, as many as needed, but no CI will automatically run on it
* Whenever the deveoper wants to merge he's changes, instead of cherry-picking
  every related change, creates just a squashed or merge¹ commit into the
  destination branch
* Then CI will run automatically on that branch as it does now


¹ a squashed commit will not retain the history, the merge
  commit will allow you to retain the intermediate commits)


The big advantage of this approach is that instead of having to rebase tenths
of patches each time and wait for tenths of jobs to finish, for each personal
branch you only have to wait for one job and you only have to rebase one
commit. That, applied to all the patches, will reduce considerably current and
future loads on jenkins, so the jobs will end faster and everyone will be
happier :)


What do you think?


On 10/22, Roy Golan wrote:
> As you probably know the CI jobs for ovirt engine takes ages. After it
> completes, you need to
> pray that the tree didn't change otherwise gerrit refuse to merge and we
> over it again.
> 
> Please disable it for now on *master*  as we can't merge quick enough.
> 
> Stable branches doesn't change that often so its a win. We don't risk them
> and they anyhow makes less noise.
> 
> Thanks,
> Roy

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-- 
David Caro

Red Hat S.L.
Continuous Integration Engineer - EMEA ENG Virtualization R&D

Tel.: +420 532 294 605
Email: dcaro at redhat.com
Web: www.redhat.com
RHT Global #: 82-62605
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