[users at bb.net] Worker running extremely slow

Dan Kegel dank at kegel.com
Mon Mar 25 16:07:32 UTC 2019


I had a hard time launching the build worker on Mac.
Launchd was fine until I needed them to them to
have access to OpenGL, at which point I had to
switch to setting the machine to autologin as the builder
account, with a start item to launch the worker.

That fails about 1% of them time because the
autologin mechanism is not reliable.
It's also hard to keep the screen from blanking
and causing opengl tests to fail.  caffeinate helps,
but not completely.
And if you want to reboot after every build to clear
kernel bugs due to OpenGL driver problems, you're
even more hosed; in recent versions of Mac OS, there is
abolutely, positively no way for the worker
to trigger a reboot without stale terminals piling up,
and after 1000 reboots, the system is out of fds, and fails.

The autologin reliability problem could probably be
worked around by having multiple autologin jobs
(a primary one, and a backup in case the primary
one didn't work).
The reboot problem could probably be worked around
but I ran out of energy after trying a dozen workarounds.

Mac OS has been working very hard to keep me from
running buildbot workers on it, and I'm a bit bitter :-(
- Dan

On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 8:55 AM Chris Mumford <cmumford at cmumford.com> wrote:
>
> I'm running it from the command-line directly -- no launchd. I am getting an file not found error when building via bb and not the command-line. Looking into that now.
>
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2019 at 11:24 AM Charles Lepple <clepple at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 23, 2019, at 2:06 PM, Chris Mumford <cmumford at cmumford.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > I've been using Buildbot several years on a project without any issues. A few months ago, for no apparent reason, my macOS builder (Mojave) started building really slow - so slow that it times out. My two Windows builders run just fine AND if I manually run the build script then it also builds just fine on the mac. The process being run is only taking about 5% of the CPU when executed from Buildbot. A build that normally finishes in 5 min. times out after 5 hours!
>>
>> How are you starting the macOS builder? If you are starting via launchd, what options are you using?
>>
>> In a similar vein, I was trying to figure out why I couldn't wrap a build in "caffeinate" on an older Mac. Same sort of thing: starting the Buildbot slave from a launchd plist would not work (timeout exceptions when the Mac went to sleep), but running it manually via SSH with caffeinate kept the box awake. (Still trying to figure out a solution for that, but I use that box for streaming music now, so it's asleep less frequently.)
>>
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>>
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