On 4 May 2018 at 17:19, Guillermo Polito <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 10:20 AM, Ben Coman <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 3 May 2018 at 23:35, Guillermo Polito <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Initially the pharo build had tests that were failing randomly.
>>> To cope with that, we introduced a retry of the tests.
>>>
>>> Nowadays, this situation is actually very rare. Tests that fail, fail
>>> always, and randomly failing tests are not seen so often... This means
>>> however, that in the case that a test is persistently failing, we are
>>> (uselessly) retrying it, and making jobs take 10-15 minutes longer for
>>> nothing.
>>>
>>
>> I'm curious...
>> are all tests retried, or only the failing one?
>>
>
> All of them.
>
>
>>
>>
>>> I propose that we remove the retries.
>>>
>>>  - This will speed up the builds that are green and only penalize those
>>> that are not green.
>>>
>>
>> If all tests pass first time there should be no retries and such a green
>> build
>> should take the same time regardless whether retries are enabled or
>> not.... ?
>>
>
> True, I don't know what I wrote there ^^.
>
> What I meant is that builds that are not green will fail sooner.
>
>
>>
>>
>>>  - Remove stress from our servers (that we use to have a higher ratio
>>> builds/hour :))
>>>  - Randomly failing tests will just need to manually retry the build.
>>> But since green builds take now ~15-20 minutes, which is in the same order
>>> of magnitude of the retries, we only penalize the one that found the hiccup.
>>>
>>
>> The "really annoying" random failures are just single failed test.
>> Perhaps assume if the count of failed tests is more than ten, then its
>> not a "random" failure and immediately fail that job.
>>
>
> But how can we distinguish between a real failing test and one that is
> random?
>
>
>> Rerunning max ten tests shouldn't add much to job time.
>> But maybe the benefit isn't worth the added complexity to do it like that.
>>
>
> The thing is also that we have to implement something custom for that. And
> I'd like to put my effort on other things that add more value in the short
> term...
>

Of course, that is the pragmatic path forward.
If you take that action, can you ping me with the PR.  Adding individual
retry is something I might look at later as lifestyle allows,
and it would be good to have a reference what was done before.

cheers -ben

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