[petsc-dev] Improving nightly builds for maint

[Satish Balay]

On Sat, 21 Oct 2017, Lisandro Dalcin wrote:

> Satish set TIMEOUT to more than 2 hours. If a test ever fails because
> of a deadlock, the build worker will be stuck for 2 hours. Of course,
> we will likely notice, but still...

As mentioned timeout doesn't reall work with valgrind builds [ perhaps
also with openmpi builds and with any mpi impl that doesn't kill child
process when mpiexec proc is killed etc.] - so short timeout is just
printing incorrect-verbose messages [i.e a kill message is printed -
but the job isn't getting killed]. - a long/infinite timeout is just
the representation of curent runtime behavior.

In the future - if all tests are converted to test harness - a few
long jobs won't be a big issue wrt throughput. [as multiple jobs get
run simultaneously]

Sure its best to not have long running test jobs - if possible.

Satish