Hello,

Following maintenance of android-build.linaro.org due to EC2 issues, I
also carved some time to finally do performance comparison of seeded
builds vs normal ones, using repo bundles (support of which was added in
the spring for our tree). Well, freshly built seed for 4.3 branch is
18Gb, which is big bump from 11Gb previous initial size as I remember
it.

Surprisingly, with unloaded master, it downloads in 7-8mins, just like
(on average) before. But what follows is 30mins checkout. If seed is not
used, the checkout (with automagic bundle download) takes ~40mins. So,
as it stands, seed no longer provides any performance advantages. One
way to explain it is the whole idea of seed is to pack small git
objects into big archive, and that's just what bundles do eithern
albeit on repository vs entire tree level.

I'd still expect seed to work somewhat faster, and have a feeling that
checkout from it of 30mins is due to some non-optimal handling from
newer repo versions, but I don't have anything to back that except my
intuition. And this work at whole was an excursion from another things
pressing in the queue, so I have nothing else to propose but:

1. To leave latest produced seed there, but disable
(resource-consuming) cronjobs to update it.
2. Gradually migrate jobs on android-build off it. 

Let me know if there're concerns/suggestions.

--
Best Regards,
Paul

Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs
Follow Linaro: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Linaro
http://twitter.com/#!/linaroorg - http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog