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Re:Crazy fast build times, or when 10 seconds starts to make... by drewg123 on Wednesday March 24, 2021 @01:48PM (#26570603)
I envy your 50ish seconds. Especially since it sounds like you could cut that down quite a bit with a beefier build rig.

I do kernel development, and for me the turn around for a one-line change is 4-minutes to 2+ hours. About 60 seconds for the build (32-core Threadripper, solid state storage), about 30 seconds to tar up the kernel and scp it to a test box, and about 2 1/2 more minutes to install the kernel and reboot (most of which is in the super slow uEFI bios). That's the 4 minutes for a trivial change.

Somewhere in the middle is ~40-ish minutes for our central CI service to run all the unit tests when a branch is pushed to.

But the 2+ hours is what I encounter most often. That is for testing non-trivial changes on production traffic. It takes over an hour to gently ramp a box down from full load to no traffic (so I can install a kernel an reboot), and another 1+ hours to ramp it up with customer traffic. Since we're testing in production, it means I often want to watch the machine closely, so that I can gracefully ramp it down if things start going pear shaped.

I agree that leaves way too much time for distraction. I try to multi-task and have multiple projects in flight at the same time in order to make more effective use of the waiting time.

Re:Crazy fast build times, or when 10 seconds starts to make... by ldiracdelta on Wednesday March 24, 2021 @08:44PM (#26575139)
I see your 2+ hours and I raise you 1/2 of a server year of test regressions for every commit to the main trunk, beginning with a 2 hour wallclock-time build of all the models needed for running CPU simulations. Total wall-clock time for edits to hit the trunk is 2.5 days.