CI Utilisation and system efficiency

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 9:10 PM Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:

> El divendres, 18 d’abril del 2025, a les 21:25:36 (Hora d’estiu d’Europa
> central), Ben Cooksley va escriure:
> > 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.
>
> I don't understand why you are putting this kind of pressure when we could
> disable the "run CI when someone pushes into a work branch (or non main
> repo)
> without creating an MR" and save like 50% of CI time.
>

Because then those people who are using work branches without a merge
request are left high and dry.
This workflow has been used many times for CI testing.

I'd have to run the numbers, but as noted above, one project is 9% of the
CI utilisation....


>
> Cheers,
>   Albert
>

Cheers,
Ben


>
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ben
>
>
>
>
>
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