Re: mark expensive tests

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/04/2016 07:48 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> How long do the tests take now on your machine(s)?  Do they really
> take a lot of time?

Yes, it takes 13 minutes with 'make', 11 minutes with 'make -j4'. This 
is on my roughly-6-year-old desktop, a 4-core AMD Phenom II X4 910e, 
Fedora 23 x86-64, a local ext4 file system mounted 
rw,relatime,seclabel,data=ordered on a hard disk. It's been this slow 
for ages (I've mentioned it here), and is why I typically don't bother 
running 'make check'.

I prefer a 'make check' (or whatever) that takes less than a minute. 
This is so that I can test the change I just installed in my private 
copy of Emacs, before publishing it. I don't want to test in the 
background because then I lose my train of thought. I prefer testing 
while writing the ChangeLog entry.

PS. I am getting due for a faster machine but not yet. I want an Intel 
Skylake so that I can verify that Emacs works with the new x86-64 
hardware-based subscript checking implemented via GCC 5's 
-fcheck-pointer-bounds option. I also want ECC memory for reliability's 
sake. This combination isn't available yet for desktops, at least not in 
configurations I can afford. All this being said, I expect that Emacs 
'make check' is slow for reasons unrelated to my 6-year-old CPU.