Comments on: Build Pattern: Green-lit build

By: admin

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:44:41 +0000

EJ: I needed to reserve some capacity, and allow the projects to build simultaneously. The Ant builds had a tendancy to do things outside the sandbox, and I didn’t fancy trying the distributed CruiseControl. It worked out all right in the end. One server was barely ever touched, it just built trunk, over and over again. From memory there were 3 separate CruiseControl servers. It would have been better to use Team City or Hudson but there were political issues.

Mike: thank you – your comment made my afternoon!

Banos: your comment turned into a new post – thanks

By: Justifying Continuous Integration Expenditure

Justifying Continuous Integration Expenditure — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:35:04 +0000

[...] admin on February 25, 2010 Banos commented on my last post: So why, oh why, oh why is it so difficult to get an additional server? Has anyone come up with a [...]

By: Banos

Banos — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:00:15 +0000

So why, oh why, oh why is it so difficult to get an additional server? Has anyone come up with a formula to produce some numbers for the bean counters to justify this already?

I propose this is an endemic problem that the guys on the ground give up fighting to resolve because there is no budget for more servers.

I might try passing this point around. Thanks for the write up.

By: MikeNereson

MikeNereson — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:18:03 +0000

People are more expensive than Continuous Integration servers; let’s optimise the system for them.

You’re an insightful man. Thanks.

By: EJC

EJC — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:42:08 +0000

I should have fully qualify that thought with –

If you can’t add more executors (build threads) and can’t add more nodes (machines that run the build threads).

In the old CC land, it was one executor per machine in your cluster (unless you wanted a headache). In Hudson (and likely in TeamCity), you can have multiple executors per node. If you’re playing with maven, make sure you use private repositories and make sure you clean them out regularly (to avoid collisions and maxing disk space).

By: EJC

EJC — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:35:47 +0000

One thing to consider – not sure how this would work with TeamCity, but in Hudson, you can label the “nodes” in your cluster. Why not reserve a node for only the fastest running builds and/or high priority builds? So you could adjust the label on the node to say, “ok, for the next hour, this node is reserved for high priority builds”.

I’ve always wished someone would build this concept into a CI server so I didn’t have to…

Additionally, in Hudson (not sure again about TeamCity) you can kill a running build (not something you could easily do in a clustered cruise control setup). Can you just punt say, a project branch build for your higher priority build?

While I can’t put my finger on it, having two production CI servers has a “code smell” of its own.