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.