Re: Intermittent parallel test failures

[Bob Proulx]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Thanks for the report.  This is a different type of failure than the
> last one, I'm glad.  It is of the kind of the lost race inherent and
> unavoidable in the test: trying to find out whether parallel execution
> really is faster than sequential, is not deterministically possible
> on non-real-time systems.

And will have quite different results on single cpu versus multi cpu
systems.

> Was the system very loaded at the time?

I do not know and do not keep records to be able to correlate it.
Probably.  It could go either way.  This is the faster 64-bit system.
So I would expect it to be less bogged down than the 32-bit system
running in parallel beside it.  If I had to guess I would say it was
running a load average of between 4 and 5 during the build and test
because htat is not uncommon.  But better would be to have this
information gathered at that point in time because I could easily guess
wrong here.

For this type of test perhaps it could be reasonable to gather this
information dynamically?  (e.g. with uptime)  Useful debug info...

> Note I'm not suggesting to make it less so; au contraire, this test
> part should either be disabled or made even less prone to failure in
> that case.  This is the first such failure in surely a lot of test
> runs.

If it is a different test failure then it certainly has had a lot of
test runs without producing this failure.

Bob