[csw-maintainers] build farm documentation

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

2013/8/16 Peter FELECAN <pfelecan at opencsw.org>:
> I want to set up an operational build farm. What are the requirements in
> term of hardware and software?

The short answer: you probably can't, and we don't know.

The long answer is that in January this year I was recording our howto
videos. I've done the basic tutorial[1] and one about patching the
source code[2]. The natural third step was to show how to set up a
buildfarm database. Before recording the video, I tried to rehearse
how to set up the db, and to my surprise, I discovered that it does
not work any more. I tried to look what's wrong, and it generally
looked like a memory leak. But after profiling the code, I saw that
it's more like a memory fragmentation problem, where the program uses
only 15-30MB of memory as reported by the memory profiler, but the
process occupies 300MB or more. How do you fix something like that?

I'm working on a rewrite since. I moved data collection into
subprocesses. The subprocess allocates all the memory and when it's
done, the OS reclaims all the RAM. It's not elegant, but it does the
job. The source code in the works is available[3]. The new code was
tested by Laurent and Carsten, and seems to work. More testing is
needed. The more help we get, the better. We could also use help with
the documentation.

Maciej

[1] Basic package building http://youtu.be/JWKCbPJSaxw
[2] Patching the source code http://youtu.be/Eq8S-futDho
[3] buildfarm DB development version http://wiki.opencsw.org/checkpkg#toc25