testsuite performance (was: [PATCH] [cygwin|mingw] Fix compile warnings when -std=c89.)

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Charles Wilson wrote on Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 08:47:42PM CET:
> [...] EVERY separate patchset requires an independent full testsuite
> run.  Until recently, that was 5 hours of sitting in front of my
> computer waiting for popups, while that computer was completely useless
> for anything else (100% cpu).

That is horrible.  May I ask what kind of CPU you have, and which Cygwin
version?  Can you work on a Linux system with Wine, for at least those
changes for which the difference shouldn't matter that much?  Can you
work on a GCC cfarm system for those tests where Cygwin isn't a premium,
and ask the people running the mingw-w64 system for an account to test
there?

FWIW, on a two-way system here, the Libtool testsuite finishes in a
little less than 6 minutes.  However that is a bit cheated, as it uses
parallel Autotest (from git Autoconf) and as yet unpublished parallel
Automake TESTS (yes I need to clean up patches for Automake and Libtool
and publish them).  On a GCC compile farm 8-way I think I brought the
test suite below a minute at one time, when excluding stress test and
low max_cmd_len test.  These two tests need to be split up and/or moved
earlier in the suite in order to allow for better parallelism.

Cheers,
Ralf