[cross-project-issues-dev] Hudson build best practice

[Winston Prakash <winston.prakash@xxxxxxxxx>]

While I was investigating Hudson performance issues, I noticed some of 
the jobs are taking 2-3 hours to build. These jobs are building several 
time a day. When I glanced at the change set some of the changes are too 
insignificant to warrant a full fledged build. I don't know much about 
what it builds, so I can't comment on what it should do.

We had a very similar situation with Hudson code base builds. The core 
build took about 2.5 hrs to finish. I wasn't happy about it. I wanted my 
continuous build feedback with in 5 mins. So we restructured the code 
base in to smaller modules and used downstream-upstream paradigm to 
create a pipeline of builds. Now, none of the jobs in the pipeline takes 
more than 10 mins to build. Of course, to build the entire pipeline it 
takes about 2-3 hours. However, since it is a branched pipeline, failure 
feedback from branches are much faster and rest of wasted builds do not 
happen.

Susan and I will be at Eclipsecon 2012 (Reston, Virginia), presenting 
"Best practices for using Hudson as part of your Agile strategy" based 
on our experience of restructuring Hudson code base for better CI 
experience . Hope to see some of you there.

PS: Sorry for the plug, thought it would help some of you to get a 
better CI  experience :-)

- Winston