Hi,
Right now check-world, a sensible thing to run before commits that
aren't very narrow, takes a long time. To the point it seems to impact
development velocity enough that it's more sensible to just skip it, and
rely on the buildfarm.
That's not a great solution.
A large amount of the time is actually spent doing completely redundant
initdb, cluster start/stop work, and running tests serially that could
be run in parallel.
A single check-world on my machine takes over 20min. That's just not
realistic to run without hurting development pace.
We can avoid a lot of redundant work (skip redundant initdb & cluster
start/stop), and we can quite easily parallelize others.
The problem is that doing so isn't something entirely trivially
scriptable, e.g. make installcheck-world doesn't run all tests, and it
doesn't do so in parallel. Scripting it locally also has the issue that
it's very easy to not notice new stuff being added by others.
As an example of the speedups, here's the comparison for contrib:
make -C contrib: 2m21.056s
make -C contrib installcheck 0m30.672s
make -C contrib -j16 -s -Otarget installcheck USE_MODULE_DB=1 0m10.418s
that's not an entirely fair comparison however, because test_decoding
doesn't to installcheck, but the general principle holds.
This is obviously a large difference.
A lot of the slow tap tests could be run serially, recoverying a lot
more time.
There's also some tests simply taking way too long, e.g. the pg_dump
tests just do largely redundant tests for 30s.
I'm not quite sure what the best way to attack this is, but I think we
need to do something.
Greetings,
Andres Freund