Toolchain builders utilisation

[Michael Hope]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 7:47 PM, Amit Kucheria <amit.kucheria at linaro.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 7:02 AM, Michael Hope <michael.hope at linaro.org> wrote:
>> Your distraction for the day...
>>
>> Toolchain has four PandaBoards that are used for building GCC, GDB,
>> and other interesting programs.  Here's a graph of how busy they are:
>>  http://ex.seabright.co.nz/misc/utilisation/ursas.png
>>
>> The green line is how many boards are currently running jobs.  The
>> blue line is how many jobs are queued up.  The spike at day 3 is the
>> end-of-week build of the upstream branches.  The drop to three boards
>> at day 7 is me reserving one for benchmarking.  The spike at day 8 is
>> the start of our release week where many commits and the final
>> tarballs are built and tested.
>>
>> All boards were busy for seven days out of eight. I think I might need
>> a few more...
>
> That is the smoothest play for a hardware grab I've ever seen. ;-)

Heh.  I wasn't sure I needed them but I am now.  Especially as I've
taken two out of the pool to run the extra release testing.

> Nice work Michael. Is the toolchain compile very CPU bound or is IO
> bandwidth a limitation for you guys? Just curious.

On ARM it's CPU bound and takes about five hours for a build and
another five for test.  A dual-core A9 is a big step up over a typical
A8.  The cloud builders are interesting - an x86 build on EC2 on an
eight core machine only uses 450 % CPU, while on a 2 CPU it uses 190
%.  It's cheaper but slower to build on a fewer core machine.

-- Michael