On Mar 7, 2021, at 00:20, Dave C wrote:
> Isn’t SSD a bad choice for server duty?
My opinion is that it is a good choice in terms of performance. When I first up
this incarnation of our buildbot system in 2016 I had the workers running on
SSDs so that builds would be fast (our previous buildbot setup at Apple's macOS
forge used a very expensive very-many-hard-disk RAID; we were in no position to
purchase any equivalent type of hardware once we left macOS forge) and I had
the master and distfiles/packages storage on a hard disk RAID for reliability.
The specific RAID that I have turned out to be too slow. Web requests could
take many seconds to respond. GitHub Web Hooks being delivered to the server
could be marked as failed because GitHub didn't always wait long enough for our
server to respond. This was unsatisfying so I moved the buildmaster to an old
SSD while keeping the large files on the RAID. This was much faster, though not
as fast as if I had used a new SSD, which is what I will ultimately be using.
For now, the buildmaster is temporarily running off a USB hard drive and is
slow as molasses. This is a terrible choice but all drive bays are already
occupied by the RAID.
All of the SSDs we used for the workers have failed as well, 2 last year and
the last one last month. In response to these failures, someone else also
suggested that we should not use SSDs. I've run one of the workers off of three
independent hard disks for the past year, and my opinion is that the
performance and power consumption of SSDs is much better and I will switch the
hard disk-based worker back to an SSD in the future. You can read this
discussion here:
https://trac.macports.org/ticket/60178
