[Python-Dev] Parallel test execution on buildbot (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Sun May 9 11:08:29 CEST 2010

On 09/05/2010 03:32, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Has anyone considered using regrtest's -j option in the buildbot configuration to speed up the test runs?

Yes, I did. I turned it off again when the tests started failing because of it. Yeah, a lot of our tests weren't written with parallel execution in mind (e.g. the existence of testsupport.TESTFN, using specific ports for test servers). While they've been getting better (e.g. increased use of randomly generated temporary directories over specific filenames, letting the OS assign a free port to servers), I believe there is still a fair bit of work to be done to make them all "parallel execution friendly" (of course, some tests, such as those that try to trigger MemoryError, are inherently parallel execution unfriendly). So yes, we've thought about it, but there's still work to be done before that option can be used without having to worry about false alarms.

FWIW I usually run the test suite with parallelization (it is just so much quicker) and these days rarely see spurious failures as a result. This is on Mac OS X, YMMV.

Michael Foord

Cheers, Nick.

-- http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/

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