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On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Matthew Treinish <mtreinish at kortar.org> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> So for the past month or so I've been working on getting tempest to work stably
> with testr in parallel. As part of this you may have noticed the testr-full
> jobs that get run on the zuul check queue. I was using that job to debug some
> of the more obvious race conditions and stability issues with running tempest
> in parallel. After a bunch of fixes to tempest and finding some real bugs in
> some of the projects things seem to have smoothed out.
>
> So I pushed the testr-full run to the gate queue earlier today. I'll be keeping
> track of the success rate of this job vs the serial job and use this as the
> determining factor before we push this live to be the default for all tempest
> runs. So assuming that the success rate matches up well enough with serial job
> on the gate queue then I will push out the change that will migrate all the
> voting jobs to run in parallel hopefully either Friday afternoon or early next
> week. Also, if anyone has any input on what threshold they feel is good enough
> for this I'd welcome any input on that. For example, do we want to ensure
> a >= 1:1 match for job success? Or would something like 90% as stable as the
> serial job be good enough considering the speed advantage. (The parallel runs
> take about half as much time as a full serial run, the parallel job normally
> finishes in ~25-30min) Since this affects almost every project I don't want to
> define this threshold without input from everyone.
>
> After there is some more data for the gate queue's parallel job I'll have some
> pretty graphite graphs that I can share comparing the success trends between
> the parallel and serial jobs.
>
> So at this point we're in the home stretch and I'm asking for everyone's help
> in getting this merged. So, if everyone who is reviewing and pushing commits
> could watch the results from these non-voting jobs and if things fail on the
> parallel job but not the serial job please investigate the failure and open a
> bug if necessary. If it turns out to be a bug in tempest please link it against
> this blueprint:
>
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/tempest/+spec/speed-up-tempest
>
> so that I'll give it the attention it deserves. I'd hate to get this close to
> getting this merged and have a bit of racy code get merged at the last second
> and block us for another week or two.
>
> I feel that we need to get this in before the H3 rush starts up as it will help
> everyone get through the extra review load faster.
>
Getting this in before the H3 rush would be very helpful. When we made
the switch with Nova's unittests we fixed as many of the test bugs
that we could find, merged the change to switch the test runner, then
treated all failures as very high priority bugs that received
immediate attention. Getting this in before H3 will give everyone a
little more time to debug any potential new issues exposed by Jenkins
or people running the tests locally.

I think we should be bold here and merge this as soon as we have good
numbers that indicate the trend is for these tests to pass. Graphite
can give us the pass to fail ratios over time, as long as these trends
are similar for both the old nosetest jobs and the new testr job I say
we go for it. (Disclaimer: most of the projecst I work on are not
affected by the tempest jobs; however, I am often called upon to help
sort out issues in the gate).

Clark