Overview

Parallel testing would be nice. Theres a bunch of things to do to make it work. See the LEP for constraints/goals/resourcing.

Known bugs/issues: parallel test bugs

Design sketch

• bin/test --parallel runs N test runners with subunit, where N is the number of cores, and the tests are partitioned across runners. (implemented)
• Layers dynamically allocate/deallocate resources such as:
  • dbnames (implemented)
  • config files (implemented)
  • librarian work dir
  • librarian ports
  • keyserver work area
  • soyuz work area

Things that need specialist knowledge:

• dynamically allocating ports for zope - port 8085 and 9025 specifically, which can then be fed back into e.g. zcml files/launchpad.conf.
• Buildmaster slave tests hard code the xmlrpc port to 8221 everywhere.

LXC containers and parallel testing

LXC containers combined with aufs offer a pretty cheap way to get solid isolation - a great big hammer of a workaround for our existing globals (shared work dirs etc). William has put together a proof of concept, and Robert has made that generic. That combined with an updated .testr.conf (a TODO is to offer profiles for testr) like:

[DEFAULT]
test_command=lxc-start-aufs $LP_LXC_BASE $PWD xvfb-run $PWD/bin/test --subunit $IDOPTION $LISTOPT
test_id_option=--load-list $IDFILE
test_list_option=--list

will let testr run tests in a temporary container. (e.g. testr -- -t stories/gpg will fire up an aufs container and run the stories/gpg tests inside it).

Be sure to export LP_LXC_BASE with the name of your lxc base container.

See Running/LXC for info on setting up abase container.

Caveats

• If the base container is running it will be a disaster. Don't try.

• aufs does not seem to permit deletes in some circumstances 729338, so test fixtures which start by deleting a directory tree will fail if the directory tree exists. Known cases:

  • /var/tmp/testkeyserver.test
  • /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main/postmaster.pid
• and conversely some need a tree:

    File "/home/robertc/source/launchpad/lp-branches/working/lib/canonical/testing/layers.py", line 1775, in startSMTPServer
      handler = logging.FileHandler(log_file)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.6/logging/__init__.py", line 819, in __init__
      StreamHandler.__init__(self, self._open())
    File "/usr/lib/python2.6/logging/__init__.py", line 838, in _open
      stream = open(self.baseFilename, self.mode)
  IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/tmp/mailman/logs/smtpd'

• If we leak a child process with a shared stdout/stderr sshd will not terminate, which will cause the testr test runner to look like it has hung. 820726. sudo pkill memcached can be used to work around this.

Workflow

• You need a temp directory in your source tree to workaround bug 808557

  mkdir temp

• Edit outside the container in your normal work area
• Start the base container to do maintenance: make schema, bin/buildout

  lxc-start -n $basename -d

  • ssh to it
  • make schema
  • bin/buildout

  • shut it down (e.g. with lxc-stop-n <name>, or poweroff -n, or your preferred method).

    • Note that lxc is fragile at the moment, you may need to manually shutdown postgresql before stopping lxc, to get it to shutdown cleanly.
• Run tests with testr: All tests

  TEMP=$(pwd)/temp testr run --parallel

  Some tests

  TEMP=$(pwd)/temp testr run --parallel -- -t stories/gpg