Re: buildfarm logging versus embedded nulls

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:
> Since the warning comes from the launcher and not the worker, I wonder
> if this is a red herring.

It's all speculation at the moment.  So far there's not really enough
evidence to refute the idea that the system was just under heavy load
at that point --- except that even under heavy load it shouldn't take
the stats collector 5 seconds to write the stats file for the regression
database, ISTM.

I wonder if there is any practical way for the buildfarm client script
to report about the system's load average, or some other gauge of how
much is going on in the buildfarm machine besides the regression tests.
One thought is just to log how long it takes to run the regression
tests.  A longer-than-usual run for a particular animal would be evidence
of a load spike; if we could correlate that with failures of this sort
it would be easier to write them off as heavy load.
        regards, tom lane