Just Run It




  • My boss asked me to run a full-scale test on some code someone else had written. I was told to launch one copy of the server program (just your basic java program using about 30 threads internally, and a massive heap) on our 16x4 core Linux server (because it was shared by everyone and I shouldn't load the entire server).

    Two hours into the run, it's obvious that it's going to take about 4.5 WEEKS to finish, so he tells me to start 31 more copies of the application. Wait, that will pummel the dev server; nobody else will be able to do anything. Don't worry, just run it!

    Nine hours later, the late afternoon/evening crush begins and the thing slows to an even slower crawl. My boss comes over and says to kill it because he forgot to tell me to run it in a certain mode, so the test needs to be done over.

    Ok, I kill everything, and before I can restart anything, everyone else kicks off all the builds and runs that had been stagnant all day: 53 parallel compiles, 47 JVMs, countless xterms, vi[m] sessions, etc, simultaneously running on 64 cores.

    My boss says to kick it off anyway and let it run all night.

    I modified the launch script to use "nice" to run it at lower priority, but that didn't really help, what with the additional 32 JVMs on top of everything else.

    I know that 64 cores sounds like a lot, but not when shared among 10 developers and full scale load tests.

    So I got paid for 24 hours over two days and all I did was catch up on my reading.



  • $ sudo killall java
    and run everything at highest priority


    "But the boss told me to do it!" :D


  • Sometimes ionice helps if it's i/o intensive, since nice only affects cpu priority.



  • It's a stresstest.

    Am just not sure for what or who.



  • You've already identified the problem. It begins with "J" and ends with "ava".



  •  The setting is called "nice"?!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dhromed said:

     The setting is called "nice"?!

    As is the program that sets it (or there's renice if you want to change the niceness of a currently running program.)



  • @bezking said:

    "But the boss told me to do it!" :D

    Cue the boss denying this.



  • @piskvorr said:

    @bezking said:
    "But the boss told me to do it!" :D

    Cue the boss denying this.
    That's why I only obey orders that I get via email.



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    You've already identified the problem. It begins with "J"  "B" and ends with "ava" "oss".
     

     FTFY


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