[Buildbot-devel] Several scalability questions

[tom fogal]

David Coppit <dcoppit at nvidia.com> writes:
[snip]
> It alludes to some limit on the number of slaves attached to a single
> master. Is 40 slaves considered to be "a lot"? What are the symptoms
> of having too many slaves?

I don't know personally, but I think the mozilla && chrome teams are
using much larger systems.  e.g. on:

  http://trac.buildbot.net/wiki/SuccessStories

mozilla says they have "700 build and test slaves".

> It appears from watching the system execute that the UI can
> slow down sch eduling and vice-versa. We thought that BB was
> multi-threaded. Can it handle hundreds of pageviews along with
> scheduling, builders, and custom build steps on the master? Is it
> possible that we've serialized the threads through table locks or
> something? (See question #6 below)

Would threading even really help?  Python's GIL is the source of
much... contention. :P

I think the situation has improved somewhat in python 3, but don't
quote me on that.

[snip] the rest that I really have no insight on, sorry.

-tom