Build niceness (original) (raw)

Magnus Ihse Bursie magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com
Thu Nov 1 11:41:05 UTC 2018

On 2018-10-18 18:08, Erik Joelsson wrote:

Hello Aleksey,

We very deliberately added the automatic niceness for a better general user experience. This was back when build-infra was new and we started pushing the parallelism of the build to where the UIs of our development systems became annoyingly slow and sluggish when building. So, I would be very against removing it completely, but I certainly think it should be possible to opt out. We should never force such a behavior on an unwilling user. My only defense is that this was done so early so we probably didn't think about it. If you would like to provide a patch adding a configure arg for disabling it, it would certainly be welcome.

An alternative, I suspect, is to lower the value that is added to the niceness, e.g. using "nice -n5" or even just "nice -n1". This sounds like it should help with your particular case, and I still think it would solve our original problem, that developer's workstations should not be unresponsive while building.

I was about to suggest that you could achieve this by overriding NICE in the configure command line, by e.g. configure NICE="/usr/bin/nice -n0" (I presume -n0 is a no-op), but it turned out that this did not work! :( I opened JDK-8213239 for this, but for the moment, that's not a usable workaround...

/Magnus

/Erik

On 2018-10-18 01:08, Aleksey Shipilev wrote: Hi,

Is there any specific user story behind "nice"-ing the compilation jobs from within the build system? It unfortunately clashes with priority budgeting. For example, my build server is used by me doing adhoc builds, automatic builds and some background tasks. The automatic build user has priority 10 set in /etc/security/limits.conf. The background user has priority 20 set in limits.conf. In theory, it sounds good: it would get all the CPU ad-hoc builds want, then give CPU to automatic build jobs, then to background jobs. But then the build nice-s the compilation jobs, which drops its priority down to the priority of background jobs: PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

25966 backgro+  39  19  808872 460772   2440 R  97.0  1.4 4181:54 R 25968 backgro+  39  19  808872 460588   2340 R  97.0  1.4 4181:17 R 25965 backgro+  39  19  808872 460864   2680 R  93.4  1.4 4180:29 R 30998 buildbot  39  19 6688224 1.050g  20000 S  64.8  3.4 4:58.52 java 27518 buildbot  39  19 2915828 110884  21740 S  47.0  0.3 0:02.57 javac 26802 buildbot  39  19  290900 264792  17392 R  38.2  0.8 0:05.48 cc1plus 27486 buildbot  39  19  200296 171792  18440 R  30.6  0.5 0:01.96 cc1plus ...which wrecks up this story. Maybe the better solution in build system is to avoid nice-ing at all, and require users who need it to invoke "nice -n ... make ..."? Or maybe at least have the knob that disables automatic niceness? Thanks, -Aleksey

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