Fedora distribution build times

[Matt Domsch]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 03:52:34PM -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-01-14 at 16:51 -0600, Matt Domsch wrote:
> 
> > It took my build system 96 hours to build all of rawhide (>10k
> > packages) for both x86_64 and i386.  Builders are 10 Dell PowerEdge
> > 1955 servers, each with 2 sockets 3GHz Xeon 5160 CPUs (4 cores each),
> > 8GB RAM.  Builders running Fedora 14.
> 
> OOI, do you sequentially build one package at a time on a builder, or do
> you do parallel builds?

Each builder runs 2 build processes for each of i386 and x86_64 in
parallel, so 4 parallel builds per server.  Each package may be using
make %{_smp_flags} which would then overcommit the CPUs.  But in all,
it's disk-bound, not CPU-bound, especially now that I can't use tmpfs.

The builders have ext4 (Fedora 14 default) where the mock chroots
live.  When the runs start, each builder creates the basic chroot, and
mock caches that and unpacks it at the start of each package build, to
save some time.  The non-base buildrequires packages get fetched from
a local server over 1GbE, so that could become a bottleneck, but isn't
terribly limiting.

-- 
Matt Domsch
Technology Strategist
Dell | Office of the CTO