[petsc-dev] speeding up testing by not always downloading external packages?

[Satish Balay]

A few other related things to do:

- add more stage1 jobs (and resources) that can catch failures early -
  but don't increase stage-1 time.

- improving stage-2 jobs time - this requires gitlab scheduler
  features [higher priority jobs over others]

  and reducing the work currently done by some of the longer (stage-2)
  jobs [this cost is dependent on if pkgs need rebuilding or not
  etc..]

Satish


On Sun, 11 Oct 2020, Satish Balay via petsc-dev wrote:

> Well I don't think the download time is significant [for all the
> builds at ANL] - as compared to the build times.
> 
> For ex: most of the time - petsc-pkg-hash gets reused [and this saves
> on both downloads and builds] - such builds take about 2h. But when
> packages have to be rebuilt - it can take 2:45 to 3h [so download part
> must be pretty small]
> 
> But yeah - its wasted bandwidth - and not tolerant to network
> disruptions.
> 
> And the other issue: might help with CI on low-bandwidth locations
> [say run a CI instance at my house on a spare laptop]
> 
> But yes - this requires infrastructure. The way I look at it is - we
> need a "local mirror" or "cache" infrastructure. 
> 
> i.e keep the cache part separate from the build part [and not intertwine them]
> 
> Spack does stuff in this direction [and also has remote cache as one
> of the 100 remote sites from where the packages can downloaded can be
> down - but its not tolerant to certain changes - so I have to
> periodically clean it - to have confidence in my build].
> 
> 
> Note: If there is a git repo locally cached (and mirrored) - we don't
> have to deal with shallow clones.
> 
> Might have a bigger impact if we can improve petsc-pkg-hash
> infrastructure to avoid rebuilds in more cases. [i.e make it more
> tolerant to configure changes - but its not clear to me - which
> changes wont require rebuilds]
> 
> Satish
> 
> 
> On Sun, 11 Oct 2020, Barry Smith wrote:
> 
> > 
> >   Satish,
> > 
> >    Do you think the time to download all the external packages for each job is significant?
> > 
> >    Would using super shallow clones on the external packages help much in time? Maybe we should to them anyways to stop wasting bandwidth?
> >    Currently we do full clones? but we don't need the huge histories. 
> > 
> >    A much more elaborate way to save more time
> > 
> >      On each test machine have repositories of all the external packages
> > 
> >      For each job, 
> > 
> >          do pull in all these repositories from remote that job depends on (usually this will get nothing so take no time)
> > 
> >         For each package either
> >     
> >             - build in a unique build directory of the repository directory directly (for CMAKE and packages that support out of base directory builds)
> > 
> >             - make a local shallow clone of the local copy of the repository to externalpackages for the rest and do those builds there 
> > 
> >        The average cost of this will just some shallow local clones instead of copying over from remote machines. 
> >        The PETSc test directories can still be completely   cleaned out for each job so Satish need not worry about testing with dirty directories.
> > 
> >        This requires a bit of infrastructure, if it saves a minute it is not worth it, but if it cuts the pipeline time from 180 minutes to 150 maybe? 
> >        Probably not worth it. Could also be done just for a couple of the most external package intense jobs.
> > 
> >   Barry
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >    
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >      
>