Re: [Monotone-devel] BSD Buildbots

[Zack Weinberg]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 7:31 PM, William Uther
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>    The BSD buildbots have been failing for a while.
[...]
>    They fail with an out of memory error on the
>  "refiner_various_counts" test.  I tried downloading a FreeBSD 6.3
>  vmware image and building and checking monotone on it.  (The VMware
>  settings gave the virtual machine a minimal 256Mb of RAM).  Everything
>  passed.  The buildbots are "softlimit"ed to "-d256000000" from
>  memory.  I couldn't find softlimit on my FreeBSD install, but I tried
>  ulimit -d250000 and everything still passed.  Then I tried -m250000 as
>  well, and everything still passed.

I think there might be something else weird with those buildbots.
That test shouldn't use anything like 256MB of memory - in fact,
massif claims it never gets above 10MB (see attached graph).  It does
repeatedly allocate and then free about 10MB of memory, though; the
only thing I can think of is that the malloc() implementation on the
buildbot is stuck in some debugging mode where it never reuses a
memory block, and that it has substantially more overhead than
massif's (fairly dumb) guess.

[ However, if I may tangent, refiner:various_counts is one of the two
unit tests that together take more time to run than the entire rest of
the test suite.  It would be great if somone would make them go
faster. ]

zw

massif.5827.ps
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