Infrastructure

Joel Madero wrote:

This being said - Robinson may need new hardware or to have access remotely to something that can build fast. We have one machine that we might be able to send with him from Bern (Bjoern might be able to bring it) if that's easier/cheaper than purchasing something new. Robinson should contact myself and Bjoern if new hardware will be needed.

Bjoern: Please tell us more about this particular hardware.

For uptime and bandwidth considerations, I think that something hosted at a colo might be our best bet, but it's definitely worth it for us to have a quick discussion about different potential setups.

Robinson Tryon wrote:

Bjoern: Please tell us more about this particular hardware.

Its a Sun Ultra 24 owned by TDF with a Yorkfield C2Q Q9650 4-way CPU and 8GB RAM, which should still be a decent builder machine. As for CoLo, please ask floeff about the details. I just need to know if I should bring that hardware to the conference.

I think our best option would be to get the hardware into our colo.

Florian: Sounds like Bjoern can bring the machine to Bern, or can ship it. Let's figure out our plan soon.

so because of canonicals travel policies making this easier, I will fly to Bern and not take the train. So I cant bring hardware.
@Flo/Robinson: Please coordinate if the colo can host and then where to sent the hardware.

Can you send me specific details on the hardware, so I can check what's
possible?

What do you need to know beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_24 ?

Florian Effenberger: According to http://www.cnet.com/products/sun-ultra-24-core-2-extreme-qx9650-3-ghz-monitor-none-series/specs/
Width 7.9 in
Depth 18.4 in
Height 17.1 in
Weight 34 lbs

Poked our new hoster for details

did some builds in amazon ec2 for comparions - the 8core ones c3.2xlarge / r3.2xlarge can do full-from-scratch ccache-driven builds in on average 20 minutes (build with no changes is ~8 minutes), including adding to bibisect-repo, with close-to-release config (i.e. with all builtin stuff), on Ubuntu 14.04, with changes 16 commits apart

--with-distro=LibreOfficeLinux
--disable-epm
--disable-dependency-tracking
--disable-odk
--enable-gstreamer
--disable-gstreamer-0-10
--disable-kde
--enable-kde4
--with-external-tar=/srv/lo/source/lo-externalsrc

in other words
8 days to build from libreoffice-4-3-branch-point to current master with 16 commits spacing (with 8core variant, there are more powerful ones available)
with spot-pricing (currently pretty stable at a little less than 0.07$/hour): around 13$ (+some cents for storage)

Christian Lohmaier wrote:

did some builds in amazon ec2 for comparions

Thats great, but a bit beside the point for this task. We already have this hardware available -- so unless we need it for something else, we should stay with bibisect on this machine. FWIW, I think having this hardware around 24/7 for QA testing/staging isnt a bad thing.

So:great to know we could move bibisect to the cloud, but since we will have the cost of hosting for this box anyway, creating the bibisects there comes essentially for free.

Robinson, can you give us a short status update? Will we meet the deadline on this, keeping in mind that #591 has an even higher priority (but earlier deadline)? A short update would be appreciated ;-)
The machine itself seems to be online, at least SSH is responsive, so from the infra POV, we're good to go - if you can quickly update me on where we stand, that'd be appreciated.

Update from team call:
Robinson will try to use the machine, and if he needs help, reconnect with Alex and Björn

Todo for Robinson: Set up a new ticket, closing this one, with details and deadline end-November, assigned to him