[cbi-dev] A note on Eclipse hardware

[Denis Roy <denis.roy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the past, Eclipse servers have always been optimized for parallel 
operations vs. single-threaded speeds (ie, lots of RAM and more CPU 
cores vs. faster CPU speed).  However, after some insightful 
conversations at EclipseCon last week, it's obvious that not every 
aspect of the build and test process can be made to run in parallel.

That means a job that takes 10 minutes on your blazing-fast i7 laptop 
takes about 30 minutes on our slow-but-robust e5520.

While it's nearly impossible for us to match the speed of desktop/laptop 
machines (server hardware tends to be slower, and since it's shared with 
others, well...), for future servers we will try to balance 
single-threaded operation performance with multiple concurrent running jobs.

If you have build/test jobs that run for extended periods, try splitting 
them up; or try running a reduced test set for those Gerrit trigger 
jobs.  This will help prevent all your executors from being tied up by 
jobs that seemingly never end.

Denis