Improving CI throughput

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Mathieu Othacehe <othacehe@gnu.org> skribis:

> The current situation is that due to Cuirass/offloading issues such as
> [1], our build farm is most of the time idle. Given our computation
> power, we should be able to bake much more substitutes I think.
>
> Maybe we could also take advantage of the build-coordinator Christopher
> is implementing (+ Guix daemon RPC's over HTTP) to make sure that we are
> able to deal with a distributed build farm efficiently.
>
> Now the question I'm asking myself is: could the ARM substitutes
> situation be solved by improving our CI software stack, or do we really
> need more hardware?

Yeah, this is a ridiculous situation.  We should do a hackathon to get
better monitoring of useful metrics (machine load,
time-of-push-to-time-to-build-completion, etc.), to clearly identify the
bottlenecks (crashes? inefficient protocol? scheduling issues? Cuirass
or offload or guix-daemon issue?), and to address as many of them as we
can.

Any volunteers?  :-)

Ludo’.