Setting up a new MariaDB Buildbot host
Yesterday I set up a new machine for our MariaDB Buildbot. This is quite an important build host for us, it runs more than 20 different builds for each push into our most important trees, and is the host that builds most of our release packages. So quite a workhorse! It is a pretty fast machine, with 5 SSD disks, 48GB of RAM and 2 x quad-core Intel Xeon E5420.
This is a replacement for the previous machine serving the same builds. The previous machine was also nice, at least on paper, with no less than 24 cores. Unfortunately we were never able to run that machine stably, it would crash/hang every few days requiring manual power cycling, which was unacceptable, of course.
The new host has been running for a day or so and seems to work well, hopefully it will prove to be more stable. I wanted to do a quick comparison of the speed of builds on the new host compared to the old:
Overall, the new builder looks about the same speed as the old one, maybe a bit faster even. Which is quite nice, given that the old one has three times the number of cores. The windows build is though significantly faster. This is probably because it turns out this is quite I/O heavy for some reason, and the new host, having SSD for storage, has significantly better I/O performance.
Windows builds they take 4 to 8 minutes on a VM on Linux on a much weaker machine owned by Philip. Something else must go wrong here, my theory is that KVM as virtualization platform is no good for Windows.