About faster make test

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 03:11:48PM -0700, Matthieu Patou wrote:
> I'm quoting another email:
> "Proper unit tests. The current make test setup is great, but that's
> basically all integration tests. I'd like to discuss adding a proper unit
> test suite that then hopefully can be run faster than the current tests. "
> 
> I'm not opposing to unit tests, but we could also make test run faster today
> by resolving this bug:https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8579
> 
> My laptop nowdays  have 4 cores, and having 8 cores in a workstation costs
> less than $700, so running environments in parallel should really speed up
> the whole test.
We've had this discussion a couple of times before over the last couple of
years. :-) Parallelising 'make test' will help the runtime, but at this point
distracts us from improving our overall test strategy - as Kai says, we
emphasize integration tests too much.

Adding parallellisation can probably get us a 2x-3x win on quad-core laptops
(since we already have more than one process active per test run, e.g. one server
and one smbtorture instance). With the current rate that we're adding integration
tests, we'll probably be back where we started (testsuite runtime-wise) in a
year or so.

Cheers,

Jelmer