Open Stack

I have a proposal - I think we should mark all recheck bugs critical,
and the respective project PTLs should actively shop around amongst
their contributors to get them fixed before other work: we should
drive the known set of nondeterministic issues down to 0 and keep it
there.

-Rob

On 25 November 2013 18:00, Joe Gordon <joe.gordon0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> TL;DR Last week the gate got wedged on nondeterministic failures. Unwedging
> the gate required drastic actions to fix bugs.
>
> Starting on November 15th, gate jobs have been getting progressively less
> stable with not enough attention given to fixing the issues, until we got to
> the point where the gate was almost fully wedged.  No one bug caused this,
> it was a collection of bugs that got us here. The gate protects us from code
> that fails 100% of the time, but if a patch fails 10% of the time it can
> slip through.  Add a few of these bugs together and we get the gate to a
> point where the gate is fully wedged and fixing it without circumventing the
> gate (something we never want to do) is very hard.  It took just 2 new
> nondeterministic bugs to take us from a gate that mostly worked, to a gate
> that was almost fully wedged.  Last week we found out Jeremy Stanley (fungi)
> was right when he said, "nondeterministic failures breed more
> nondeterministic failures, because people are so used to having to reverify
> their patches to get them to merge that they are doing so even when it's
> their patch which is introducing a nondeterministic bug."
>
> Side note: This is not the first time we wedge the gate, the first time was
> around September 26th, right when we were cutting Havana release candidates.
> In response we wrote elastic-recheck
> (http://status.openstack.org/elastic-recheck/) to better track what bugs we
> were seeing.
>
> Gate stability according to Graphite: http://paste.openstack.org/show/53765/
> (they are huge because they encode entire queries, so including as a
> pastebin).
>
> After sending out an email to ask for help fixing the top known gate bugs
> (http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2013-November/019826.html),
> we had a few possible fixes. But with the gate wedged, the merge queue was
> 145 patches  long and could take days to be processed. In the worst case,
> none of the patches merging, it would take about 1 hour per patch. So on
> November 20th we asked for a freeze on any non-critical bug fixes (
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2013-November/019941.html
> ), and kicked everything out of the merge queue and put our possible bug
> fixes at the front. Even with these drastic measures it still took 26 hours
> to finally unwedge the gate. In 26 hours we got the check queue failure rate
> (always higher then the gate failure rate) down from around 87% failure to
> below 10% failure. And we still have many more bugs to track down and fix in
> order to improve gate stability.
>
>
> 8 Major bug fixes later, we have the gate back to a reasonable failure rate.
> But how did things get so bad? I'm glad you asked, here is a blow by blow
> account.
>
> The gate has not been completely stable for a very long time, and it only
> took two new bugs to wedge the gate. Starting with the list of bugs we
> identified via elastic-recheck, we fixed 4 bugs that have been in the gate
> for a few weeks already.
>
>
>  https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1224001 "test_network_basic_ops fails
> waiting for network to become available"
>
> https://review.openstack.org/57290 was the fix which depended on
> https://review.openstack.org/53188 and https://review.openstack.org/57475.
>
> This fixed a race condition where the IP address from DHCP was not received
> by the VM at the right time. Minimize polling on the agent is now defaulted
> to True, which should reduce the time needed for configuring an interface on
> br-int consistently.
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1252514 "Swift returning errors when setup
> using devstack"
>
> Fix https://review.openstack.org/#/c/57373/
>
> There were a few swift related problems that were sorted out as well. Most
> had to do with tuning swift properly for its use as a glance backend in the
> gate, ensuring that timeout values were appropriate for the devstack test
> slaves (in
>
> resource constrained environments, the swift default timeouts could be
> tripped frequently (logs showed the request would have finished successfully
> given enough time)). Swift also had a race-condition in how it constructed
> its sqlite3
>
> files for containers and accounts, where it was not retrying operations when
> the database was locked.
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/swift/+bug/1243973 "Simultaneous PUT requests for
> the same account..."
>
> Fix https://review.openstack.org/#/c/57019/
>
> This was not on our original list of bugs, but while in bug fix mode, we got
> this one fixed as well
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1251784 "nova+neutron scheduling error:
> Connection to neutron failed: Maximum attempts reached
>
> Fix https://review.openstack.org/#/c/57509/
>
> Uncovered on mailing list
> (http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2013-November/019906.html)
>
> Nova had a very old version of oslo's local.py which is used for managing
> references to local variables in coroutines. The old version had a pretty
> significant bug that basically meant non-weak references to variables were
> not managed properly. This fix has made the nova neutron interactions much
> more reliable.
>
> This fixed the number 2 bug on our list of top gate bugs
> (http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2013-November/019826.html
> )!
>
>
> In addition to fixing 4 old bugs, we fixed two new bugs that were introduced
> / exposed this week.
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1251920 "Tempest failures due to failure to
> return console logs from an instance Project"
>
> Bug: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/54363/ [Tempest]
>
> Fix(work around): https://review.openstack.org/#/c/57193/
>
> After many false starts and banging our head against the wall, we identified
> a change to tempest, https://review.openstack.org/54363 , that added a new
> test around the same time as bug 1251920 became a problem. Forcing tempest
> to skip this test had a very high incidence of success without any 1251920
> related failures. As a result we are working arond this bug by skipping that
> test, until it can be run without major impact to the gate.
>
> The change that introduced this problematic test had to go through the gate
> four times before it would merge, though only one of the 3 failed attemps
> appears to have triggered 1251920.  Or as  Jeremy Stanley  (fungi) said
> "nondeterministic failures breed more nondeterministic failures, because
> people are so used to having to reverify their patches to get them to merge
> that they are doing so even when it's their patch which is introducing a
> nondeterministic bug."
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1252170 "tempest.scenario
> test_resize_server_confirm failed in grenade"
>
> Fix https://review.openstack.org/#/c/57357/
>
> Fix https://review.openstack.org/#/c/57572/
>
> First we started running post Grenade upgrade tests in parallel (to fix
> another bug) which would normally be fine, but Grenade wasn't configuring
> the small flavors typically used by tempest so it was possible for the
> devstack Jenkins slaves to run out of memory when starting many larger VMs
> in parallel. To fix this devstack lib/tempest has been updated to create the
> flavors only if they don't exist and Grenade is allowing tempest to use its
> default instance flavors.
>
>
>
> Now that we have the gate back into working order, we are working on the
> next steps to prevent this from happening again.  The two most immediate
> changes are:
>
> Doing a better job of triaging gate bugs
> (http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2013-November/020048.html
> ).
>
> In the next few days we will remove  'reverify no bug' (although you will
> still be able to run 'reverify bug x'.
>
>
> Best,
> Joe Gordon
> Clark Boylan
>
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> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
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>



-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud