[openstack-dev] [TripleO] Switching CI back to amd64

Derek Higgins derekh at redhat.com
Wed Jan 7 10:51:41 UTC 2015


Hi All,
    I intended to bring this up at this mornings meeting but the train I
was on had no power sockets (and I had no battery) so sending to the
list instead.

We currently run our CI with on images built for i386, we took this
decision a while back to save memory ( at the time is allowed us to move
the amount of memory required in our VMs from 4G to 2G (exactly where in
those bands the hard requirements are I don't know)

Since then we have had to move back to 3G for the i386 VM as 2G was no
longer enough so the saving in memory is no longer as dramatic.

Now that the difference isn't as dramatic, I propose we switch back to
amd64 (with 4G vms) in order to CI on what would be closer to a
production deployment and before making the switch wanted to throw the
idea out there for others to digest.

This obviously would impact our capacity as we will have to reduce the
number of testenvs per testenv hosts. Our capacity (in RH1 and roughly
speaking) allows us to run about 1440 ci jobs per day. I believe we can
make the switch and still keep capacity above 1200 with a few other changes
1. Add some more testenv hosts, we have 2 unused hosts at the moment and
we can probably take 2 of the compute nodes from the overcloud.
2. Kill VM's at the end of each CI test (as opposed to leaving them
running until the next CI test kills them), allowing us to more
successfully overcommit on RAM
3. maybe look into adding swap on the test env hosts, they don't
currently have any, so over committing RAM is a problem the the OOM
killer is handling from time to time (I only noticed this yesterday).

The other benefit to doing this is that is we were to ever want to CI
images build with packages (this has come up in previous meetings) we
wouldn't need to provide i386 packages just for CI, while the rest of
the world uses the amd64.

Thanks,
Derek.



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