[hibernate-dev] Jenkins job priorities

[Yoann Rodiere]

Hello,

TL;DR: I installed a plugin to prioritize Jenkins jobs, please let me know
if you notice anything wrong. Also, I will remove the Heavy Job plugin
soon, let me know if you're not okay with that.

I recently raised the issue on HipChat that some Jenkins builds are
triggered in batch, something like 4 or 5 at a time. Since builds are
executed in the order they are requested, this forces the next requested
builds to wait for more than one hour before being executed, regardless of
their urgency.
One example of such batch is whenever something is pushed to Hibernate ORM
master (or Search master, probably): one build is triggered for tests
against H2, another for tests against PostgreSQL, another for tests against
MariaDB, and so on.

It turns out there is a solution for this problem: the PrioritySorter
plugin. I installed the plugin on CI and configured it to give higher
priority to the following builds:

   - Builds triggered by users (highest priority)
   - Release builds (builds in the "Release" view)
   - Website builds (builds in the "Website" view)
   - PR builds (builds in the "PR" view)

In practice, such builds will be moved to the front of the queue whenever
they are triggered, resulting in reduced waiting times.

I hope we will be able to use this priority feature instead of the Heavy
Job plugin (which allows to assign weights to jobs), and avoid concurrent
builds completely. With the current setup, someone releasing his/her
project will only have to wait for the currently executing build to finish,
and will get the highest priority on the release builds. Maybe this is
enough? If you disagree, please raise your concerns now: I will disable the
Heavy Job plugin soon and set each slave to only offer one execution slot.

Please let me know if you notice anything wrong. I tested the plugin on a
local Jenkins instance, but who knows...

Yoann


-- 
Yoann Rodiere
yoann at hibernate.org / yrodiere at redhat.com
Software Engineer
Hibernate NoORM team