PGCon2016 - 20180510
PGCon 2016
The PostgreSQL Conference
Speakers | |
---|---|
Noah Misch |
Schedule | |
---|---|
Day | Talks - Day 2 - 2016-05-20 |
Room | DMS 1120 |
Start time | 15:00 |
Duration | 00:45 |
Info | |
ID | 927 |
Event type | Lecture |
Track | Hacking |
Language used for presentation | English |
Not Easy Being Green
The Long Tail of Buildfarm Failures
In addition to its primary role of verifying portability, the buildfarm reveals race conditions.
The PostgreSQL buildfarm is the community's implementation of continuous testing. It enables PostgreSQL to consistently issue portable releases despite each contributor testing on no more than a few platforms. Each buildfarm failure report invites human assessment, which often prompts a quick fix. Certain failure modes, especially narrow race conditions, persist for months. After outlining typical difficulties of making tests pass everywhere, this talk will detail a four-month project to purge the race conditions from one regression test.