CI Utilisation and system efficiency

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, May 6, 2025 at 9:35 PM Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de> wrote:

> On Mittwoch, 30. April 2025 21:07:35 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit Ben
> Cooksley
> wrote:
> > On Thu, May 1, 2025 at 3:42 AM Milian Wolff <mail at milianw.de> wrote:
> > > On Freitag, 18. April 2025 21:25:36 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit Ben
> > > Cooksley
> > >
> > > 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.
> > >
> > > <snip>
> > >
> > > > 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.
> > >
> > > How? Where do I find more information on this?
> >
> > Please see
> >
> https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-utilities/-/blob/master/config/global.yml
> > ?ref_type=heads#L10 You just need to set it to True.
> >
> > Once that is done then
> >
> https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-utilities/-/blob/master/run-ci-build.py?r
> > ef_type=heads#L202 will be triggered.
>
> Why is this not enabled by default? I.e. why do we need to set this on a
> per-
> project level - in my opinion ccache will work with every project and
> benefit
> them all?
>

Because the builders have limited disk space available, and the reality is
the vast majority of projects are small enough, and built infrequently
enough (comparatively) that the cost of that additional disk space is not
worth it.

If we use KGuiAddons as an example, on Alpine - everything from the very
beginning to end of the CI job (which includes cloning code, fetching and
unpacking deps, configuring, compiling and installing, capturing and
uploading the built binaries and running tests as well as capturing code
coverage information only took 64 seconds - see
https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kguiaddons/-/jobs/2882133)

KImageFormats only took 2 minutes -
https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kimageformats/-/jobs/2884461

It is only is a project is built extremely frequently or is of sufficient
size that it takes a while to compile that optimisations such as ccache
begin to make sense.


> Thanks
> --
> Milian Wolff
> mail at milianw.de
> http://milianw.de


Thanks,
Ben
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