Re: builds are getting slower?

[Pádraig Brady]

I noticed you mentioned inotify tests were slow on emacs.
tail(1) tests in coreutils had the same issue,
and when fixed it identified harder to hit race bugs within tail
as well as greatly speeding up the test runs as shown below:

  $ time make -j8 check TESTS="..."
  real 0m4.886s
  user 0m5.375s
  sys 0m4.565s
  =======================================================
  Testsuite summary for GNU coreutils 8.24.107-e369f
  =======================================================
  # TOTAL: 29
  # PASS:  28
  # SKIP:  1

The main technique used in those tests was a truncated exponential back-off
mechanism, which allows for faster operation in the normal case, but
will add extra delays where required. See the use of retry_delay_():
git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f=init.cfg;h=e4309ae5;hb=HEAD#l628

cheers,
Pádraig.