[Buildbot-devel] BzrPoller leaves zombies

[Kristian Nielsen]

Aleksandr Kuzminsky <aleksandr.kuzminsky at percona.com> writes:

> Kristian,
>> One alternative, which may or may not work for you, is to use email
>>  notifications from Launchpad instead of polling, using class
>> BzrLaunchpadEmailMaildirSource.
>>
> I would prefer the working poller of course. However it could be an

Of course.

I cannot help you with the poller zombies. I moved away from the BzrPoller, as
using email notification has a number of advantages for us:

 - Less delay from branch changes to buildbot notices.

 - Much less load on Launchpad (and on own connection as well).

 - If you don't have append_revision_only set on your branch, a push can lower
   the tip-of-tree revision number, which confuses the BzrPoller but works ok
   with BzrLaunchpadEmailMaildirSource.

There are disasvantages as well, of course, including having to set up email
receiving infrastructure, and needing to run not yet released buildbot on the
master.

> option if nothing helps to get rid of zombies.

One thing I would suggest is to look into upgrading bzr if it is not the
latest. If I remember correctly, the BzrPoller code does all of its work by
calling into the Bzr library within a separate thread. It may be that the
problem is not in the Buildbot code, but rather in the Bzr library code,
hopefully fixed in a newer release. At least I never saw any zombies when we
were using the BzrPoller. Just a wild guess, but maybe worth a try.

 - Kristian.