[Buildbot-devel] Buildbot 1.0: The Shimmering Vision

[Stefan Seefeld]

Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld at sympatico.ca> wrote:
>   
>> I'd like to add load balancing to this list. I have submitted an RFE for
>> this a *long* time ago (http://buildbot.net/trac/ticket/42), but
>> unfortunately this got moved back from milestone to milestone. I don't
>> actually believe much is missing in order to get this working, but I
>> lack the insight to just roll it on my own.
>>     
>
> That would figure into the basic job-scheduling system.  We have a
> little bit of it now -- I use it to limit the number of simultaneous
> builds on Virtual Machines on the same hardware.  But it could be
> better and more general.
>   

Indeed. For example:

* Set up 'classes' of slaves, all presumed to be identical as far as 
builder environments are concerned, so the master would be free to pick 
any slave out of a given class to actually run a build.

* Query the current load (or a similar metric) to decide which slave to 
delegate to.

While limitting number of builders is useful, it assumes that nothing 
else is running on the machine that could limit the slave's 
availability. In my company we have a build farm, but shared by a number 
of unrelated projects, where coordination through a shared buildbot 
setup isn't practical.

As I asked on the issue #42 a long time ago: I'm not sure what is 
actually missing. It was my impression that it's not much.


Thanks,
       Stefan


-- 

      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...