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Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by pushrax on Sunday October 25, 2020 @10:18PM (#24892250)
I would expect that internally someone profiled the build (i.e. looked at timestamps) and then either profiled git, or just looked at the logs and did some guessing/research. This didn't seem like it would be complicated to find once you realize the time is spent in git.

Also, this probably has been an exponentially increasing problem, and wasn't really a priority to solve until relatively recently. I would bet there are a lot of stale undeleted branches.

Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by marta_morena_28 on Sunday October 25, 2020 @11:53PM (#24892692)
It really doesn't sound complicated to find, unless you just have a handsoff approach to building things and just don't care as long as "something" comes out on the other end.

What makes me wonder however is this: 40 min made them look into this? I mean 40 min is crazy long. What builds this long? Chrome, Windows, Linux Kernel on a single core? This should have been raising red flags much earlier. The only explanation I can come up with is that the whole build takes hours anyway, otherwise there is no way you wouldn't notice this sooner.

Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by detaro on Monday October 26, 2020 @03:36AM (#24893654)
Remember "build" time likely also includes test runs, packaging for deployment, ... 40 mins is easy to get to, and has nothing to do with "on a single core".
Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by sumedh on Monday October 26, 2020 @08:39AM (#24895471)
You can still see which stages are taking a long time.
Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by jeromenerf on Monday October 26, 2020 @08:51AM (#24895593)
I wonder if people went into the habit of synchronizing git pushes with socializing breaks, with the proverbial excuse of "yeah, compiling ...".

On day, someone forgot to brief the foreign intern about the necessity of breaks, intern fixes the issue, pointy-hair-boss gets wind of the news, old crew gets fired, new intern gets promoted and fixes also the Pinterest spam on google images.

Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by znpy on Monday October 26, 2020 @09:10AM (#24895755)
> new intern gets promoted and fixes also the Pinterest spam on google images

A man can dream.

Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by pushrax on Monday October 26, 2020 @12:28AM (#24892832)
It takes >12h to build Windows on the MS build platform.

On a single core, Chromium surely takes hours to build.

Though I agree that 40min for the repository in question is highly suspect.

Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by masklinn on Monday October 26, 2020 @02:45AM (#24893407)
> On a single core, Chromium surely takes hours to build.

Earlier this year Bruce Dawson had a post indicating that it took about a CPU-day, though coalescing files (“jumbo builds”) significantly reduces build time (we’re talking down to 5h), however that’s at the expense of incremental building, and it constrains the code as you can get symbol collisions between the coalesced files.

Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by Dylan16807 on Monday October 26, 2020 @05:57AM (#24894413)
I read that comment as only applying the "single core" part to the Linux kernel, not Chromium.
Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by maccard on Monday October 26, 2020 @04:25AM (#24893894)
I work in games, a clean sync of our project takes well over an hour (and if you're at home it takes multiple hours), and compiling takes a large amount of time. We use lots of tricks - "unity" builds with out build system detecting modified files and compiling them standalone as an example. On my last workstation (2x intel xeon gold) it took about 30 minutes to compile
Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by oefrha on Monday October 26, 2020 @12:08AM (#24892745)
Yep, I’m shocked that it had to be bloated to 40min before they even thought about fixing it. Anyone who has used Jenkins for nontrivial builds must have had the experience of staring at the slowly expanding session log screen? It doesn’t take any “profiling” to realize git clone’s taking forever.
Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99% by ImprovedSilence on Monday October 26, 2020 @09:04PM (#24903482)
I remember hearing facebook was on the order of hours (6+) to build.