CI Utilisation and system efficiency

Ben Cooksley bcooksley at kde.org
Fri May 2 21:18:00 BST 2025


On Sat, May 3, 2025 at 3:27 AM Christoph Cullmann <christoph at cullmann.io>
wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> at work we use cmake unity build to save time & costs.
>
> Would that be some idea here, too?
>
> Naturally as side effect that can hide compile issues
> or introduce ones.
>

We could look into that, just not sure how it would save compile times
though?
We have extremely fast NVMe storage on the builders, so we're unlikely to
be IO constrained.


>
> Greetings
> Christoph
>

Thanks,
Ben


>
> On Friday, April 18th, 2025 at 21:25, Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org>
> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Over the past week or two there have been a number of complaints regarding
> CI builder availability which i've done some investigating into this
> morning.
>
> Part of this is related to the Windows CI builders falling offline due to
> OOM events, however the rest is simply due to a lack of builder time
> availability (which is what this email is focused on).
>
> Given we have 6 Hetzner AX51 servers connected to Gitlab (each equipped
> with a Ryzen 7 7700 CPU, 64GB RAM and NVMe storage) the issue is not
> available build power - it is the number of builds and the length of those
> builds that is at issue.
>
> This morning I ran a basic query to ascertain the top 20 projects for CI
> time utilisation on invent.kde.org which revealed the following:
>
> full_path | time_used | job_count
> ------------------------------+------------------+-----------
> plasma/kwin | 320:47:04.966412 | 2387
> graphics/krita | 178:03:19.080763 | 423
> multimedia/kdenlive | 174:08:09.876842 | 697
> network/ruqola | 173:17:47.311305 | 555
> plasma/plasma-workspace | 155:10:03.618929 | 660
> network/neochat | 138:03:23.926652 | 1546
> education/kstars | 129:49:17.74229 | 329
> sysadmin/ci-management | 111:21:09.739792 | 154
> plasma/plasma-desktop | 108:56:52.849433 | 776
> kde-linux/kde-linux-packages | 81:00:10.001937 | 33
> kdevelop/kdevelop | 59:40:51.54474 | 217
> office/kmymoney | 54:32:00.24623 | 271
> frameworks/kio | 53:54:19.046685 | 690
> education/labplot | 52:36:30.343671 | 245
> murveit/kstars | 52:32:56.882728 | 128
> frameworks/kirigami | 47:07:19.172935 | 1627
> system/dolphin | 46:09:58.02836 | 705
> kde-linux/kde-linux | 39:25:54.052469 | 46
> utilities/kate | 36:09:22.18958 | 356
> wreissenberger/kstars | 35:58:14.120515 | 105
>
> If we look closely, KStars has three spots on this list (totalling 216
> hours of time used, making it the biggest app user of CI time).
>
> Projects on the above list are asked to please review their jobs and how
> they are conducting development to ensure CI time is used efficiently and
> appropriately.
>
> Other projects should also please review their usage and optimise
> accordingly even if they're not on this list as there is efficiencies to be
> found in all projects.
>
> When reviewing the list of CI builds projects have enabled, it is
> important to consider to what degree your project benefits from having
> various builds enabled. One common pattern i've seen is having Alpine, SUSE
> Qt 6.9 and SUSE Qt 6.10 all enabled.
>
> If you need to verify building on Alpine / MUSL type systems and wish to
> monitor for Qt Next regressions then you probably shouldn't have a
> conventional Linux Qt stable build as those two jobs between them already
> cover that list of permutations.
>
> I've taken a quick look at some of these and can suggest the following:
>
> KWin: it has two conventional Linux jobs (suse_qt69 and suse_qt610) plus a
> custom reduced feature set job. It seems like one of these conventional
> Linux jobs should be dropped.
>
> KStars: Appears to have a custom Linux job in addition to a conventional
> Linux job. Choose one please.
>
> Ruqola: Appears to be conducting a development process whereby changes are
> made in stable then immediately merged to master in a ever continuing loop.
> Please discontinue this behaviour and only periodically merge stable to
> master.
>
> Also needs to drop one of it's Linux jobs as they're duplicating
> functionality as noted above.
>
> Plasma Workspace/Desktop: At least in part this seems to be driven by
> Appium tests. Please reduce the number of these and/or streamline the
> process for running an Appium test. Consideration should be given to
> enabling the CI option use-ccache as well.
>
> KDevelop: Please enable the CI option use-ccache.
>
> Labplot: Appears to have a strange customisation in place to the standard
> jobs which shouldn't be necessary as flags in .kde-ci.yml should permit
> that to be done.
>
> Thanks,
> Ben
>
>
>
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