[tei-council] Speeding up Jinks builds

[Martin Holmes]

This message is mostly for Sebastian, but I'm sending it to the list 
because anyone could potentially have suggestions that would help, and 
most of us will end up as a Release Technician at some point.

Yesterday was a bit exceptional in that there were lots of last-minute 
commits that held up the build process, but we did notice that waiting 
for Jinks builds to complete was very tedious, and spent some time 
thinking about ways we might speed this up. These issues crossed my mind:

  - I'm not sure why P5-Documentation and P5 are two separate jobs. 
Could they be combined? I think that would be quicker in that it would 
save copying over lots of stuff from the workspace of one build to the 
other.

  - A few months ago, all builds were going much more quickly on both 
Jinkses. I can't think what's changed, except for the move to XInclude 
from entities. Is it possible that makes a difference? It might be worth 
doing some tests to find out, and if it does, investigate a way of doing 
the XIncludes more quickly.

  - Both Jinkses are running on virtual machines, so we can presumably 
push up the memory or change the processing for the VMs if that will 
help. I'd like to investigate whether adding more cores would be useful 
(if, for instance, separate build jobs run on separate cores), and 
whether more memory will make much difference.

  - I suspect there are lots of tweaks I could make to how memory is 
allocated to ant tasks etc., and those could also be integrated into the 
Jinks server build script.

Anything else anyone can think of that would help speed up the Jinkses? 
We're committed to steadily adding more and more tests to P5-Test 
(Schematron etc.), so that build is going to take progressively longer; 
anything we can do to mitigate that would be really helpful.

Cheers,
Martin
-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)