[tei-council] Speeding up Jinks builds

[Sebastian Rahtz]

On 26 Oct 2012, at 16:43, Martin Holmes <mholmes at uvic.ca> wrote:
> 
>  - 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.

hmm. I don't know why we did 3 jobs instead of 2. I can't see a downside
to removing Documentation, and letting P5 do the work.

> 
>  - 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.

can't explain it, sorry. I am sure its not the XIncludes - that happens once,
early on, and thereafter everyone uses the same single file.  that should
have made it faster, not slower.

someone could put in timing messages and see which part of the build
takes time. I am not volunteering :-}
> 
>  - 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.

maybe.  my gut feeling is that looking at the work its doing is more benefit,
but i may well be wrong

>  - 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.
i am curious. why do you think these are an issue?

> 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.


we need profiling. which components of the build take the time?

my observation of slow bits are:

  - the jobs needed for each test file
  - running LaTeX 3 times
  - making .mobi file
  - validating all the HTML files

--
Sebastian Rahtz      
Director (Research Support) of Academic IT Services 
University of Oxford IT Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431