[Buildbot-devel] Inconsistent UI performance?

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Amber Yust <ayust at yelp.com> wrote:
> Buildbot is single threaded (but asynchronous). This means that when the
> master has lots of load due to a new build request or the like, it will
> temporarily slow down UI responsiveness due to other tasks being processed
> and eating up slices of processing time.
> There are plans to move the UI to a separate process, so that Buildbot build
> processing would not have an impact on UI load times, but that has not yet
> been implemented.

Amber's right - this is a well-known problem with buildbot.  The
waterfall and other "aggregate" views are particularly awful, because
they block *any* other activity on the master until they are done
rendering.

Phillipe's suggestion is a good one - you can set the various build
horizons to something small enough, and the build cache to something
large enough, that your master doesn't thrash loading pickles all day.

In the long term, the two fixes to this are:
 1. store build data in a database, not pickles
 2. render complex pages client-side, using REST queries to get the data

Both are slated for Buildbot-0.9.0.

Dustin