CI: 2023 08 25

Attendees

• Jacob Nesbitt
• John Parent
• Luke Peyralans
• Massimiliano Culpo
• Mike VanDenburgh
• Ryan Krattiger
• Scott Wittenburg
• Tammy Dahlgren
• Todd Gamblin
• Zack Galbreath

Metrics & Dashboarding

• Ryan's timing statistics PR looks like it should be ready to merge soon!
• Folks from Kitware and LLNL got together this week to flesh out the structure of our analytics database.
• Scott using these new capabilities to design an experiment comparing S3 vs. CloudFront download speeds for our GitLab CI runners.

Buildcache Pruning

• Scott and Ryan spent this this week comparing different pruning strategies in an effort to shake out any lingering bugs and achieve consistent results.
• This was successful and they ran the pruning script for our per-stack mirrors on Aug. 24! This has already resulted in a speedup boost for our rebuild-index jobs. Remaining steps are:
  • Prune the top-level "root" mirror
  • Automate this process via cron job or similar

Windows CI

• John is investigating replacing our current generated install.sh script with Python instead. This would make our GitLab CI pipelines more cross-platform friendly.

Priorities

• Automate pruning
• Investigate boostrapping awscli / boto3 in our gitlab ci images. The context here is that our Ubuntu 18.04 image currently doesn't have these packages installed, which makes our rebuild-index jobs run slowly.
• cache.spack.io feature request: when you select a stack, provide an option to filter the results to show root specs only.
• Help UO migrate their custom images from DockerHub to GHCR to avoid rate limiting in "rebuild everything" pipelines.
• Continue investigating the use of CloudFront to speedup CI and public buildcache usage.
• Keep progressing towards the following goals:
  • Timing Dashboards
  • Gitlab CI runners for Windows