OS X buildbots/ci: call to action · Issue #367 · nodejs/build (original) (raw)
Our current state of testing on OS X is (and has been for a while) uncertain. The machines provided by Voxer (which as been serving us fine up to recently) has no more support, meaning should they die or run into issues we can't manage remote, we're out of luck.
Also, OS X coverage is poor. We're currently testing and releasing on 10.10, but since Node.js is "officially" (TBD) supporting 10.7 and up, we should cover these. In order to establish what our lowest supported OS X will be; vm's should be in place to verify that.
Finally, we've been seeing traffic related issues at Voxer – tests timing out because of poor network latency – an issue out of our reach.
We've been exploring two options:
- invest in a few mac minis
- good: much resources
- bad: we can't get hold of older versions of OS X
- good/bad (depending on how you see it): we require dedicated hosting such as macminicolo, macminivault
- go with a vm provider such as macstadium
- good: they provide a wide range of os x
- good: managed hosting and no investment in hardware required
- bad: more expensive (estimated cost: $800/mo)
Additionally, we've reached out to a few potential sponsors that could help us with either option - but nothing is locked in so far.
My suggestion would be the following setup:
- 2x 10.7 4G ram 2vcpu (~40G disk)
- 2x 10.8 4G ram 2vcpu (~40G disk)
- 2x 10.9 4G ram 2vcpu (~40G disk)
- 2x 10.10 4G ram 2vcpu (~40G disk)
- 2x 10.11 4G ram 2vcpu (~40G disk)
- 2x 10.10 2G ram 2vcpu for release (~40G disk)
I've managed to run our test suite on a jenkins 2G vm (10.10) but I think we'll be running into memory issues. If we're virtualising, I guess 3G would work fine as well. If we have enough room we should probably look at additionally adding a 8G vm for v8.
We need to act to avoid downtime and also be able to improve our quality of OS X support. How do we move forward?