Re: [opensuse-buildservice] Use solid state disks [ssd] to improve obs build times.

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 11:46 AM, David Greaves wrote:

On 19/04/11 18:49, Greg Freemyer wrote:

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On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Stephen Shaw  wrote:

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On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 02:19,  wrote:

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Hello With the opensuse build service [obs] getting more usage every day I wonder if this would make a diffence :-

1. Use  solid state disks [ssd] to  improve build times of package rpms on, perhaps point the BuildRoot or _tmppath to the ssd's

Reason for asking. Improve the packaging times during busy times on obs.

Cheers Glenn.

Unfortunately there is a cost associated, but it would be cool to get a bunch of fusion IO cards and see how they perform.

Here is a youtube video of 1 fusion IO card handling 4500 movies streaming at once.  If I understood it right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J5xGwdmsuo

Clearly buying SSD costs money.

But buying a $1000 250 GB SSD for one of the build servers would be cheaper than buying a whole new server.

So the next time an expansion to the build farm is budgeted, I hope getting SSDs for the buildroot is considered as an option.

If the thread from 6 months ago is still accurate, having a SSD might double the compile speed of a build farm node.

Don't forget that workers are very, very write-heavy. This is not the best I/O pattern for SSD; and of course the vast majority of data written during a build-preparation is never re-read.

Why is a write heavy load not good for a SSD? Performance or Lifetime? For performance, the big issue is random i/o vs sequential. A rotating disk and a SSD should have similar sequential speeds. But for random i/o the SSD should be much, much faster in that it should barely slow down due to a random i/o write pattern. Also, the mkfs version in 11.4 tells the SSD that all of the sectors in the partition are unused (trim'ed) prior to starting the format. That should ensure consistent highspeed operation out of the SSD. If the build farm is up to 11.4 yet, just the mkfs.ext4 package could be used I suspect. For lifetime, I don't know. But a typical build seems to take several minutes, so the writes to the SSD don't seem like they would be that outrageously heavy. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org