With regards to the build times mentioned below I suspect your laptop has a higher clock speed compared to your server which likely has many cores to host many guest VMs, one of which is Jenkins. Cores are great for supporting many guest VMs but in a build environment they struggle due to most 8-14 core Xeons only having 2.xGHz clock speed. Cheap Dell R220’s offer Intel 4 core Xeons with 3.7ghz and they work great for our build machines. A 1ghz diff (2.x to 3.x GHz) in some builds can double overall build times.

 

Lee Meinecke, CISSP

Research Associate

Georgia Tech Research Institute

Applied Systems Laboratory

 

 

From: Shawn Wells <shawn@redhat.com>
Reply-To: SCAP Security Guide <scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org>
Date: Tuesday, August 2, 2016 at 5:45 PM
To: SCAP Security Guide <scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org>
Cc: open-scap-list <open-scap-list@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: Latest OpenSCAP changes to speed up SSG builds

 

 

 

On 8/2/16 2:51 PM, Martin Preisler wrote:

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jan Lieskovsky" <jlieskov@redhat.com>
> To: "Martin Preisler" <mpreisle@redhat.com>
> Cc: "SCAP Security Guide" <scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org>, "open-scap-list" <open-scap-list@redhat.com>
> Sent: Monday, August 1, 2016 12:38:01 PM
> Subject: Re: Latest OpenSCAP changes to speed up SSG builds
> 
> 
> Hello Martin,
> 
> [snip]
> 
> I agree this change to be safe to be applied on Jenkins slaves
> (IOW it's functionally identical to version in previous oscap releases).
Thanks for the review, Jan!
 
I have applied the optimizations on Jenkins slaves and from my initial
testing the time required for pull request builds and normal CI builds
went down roughly 35-40%. It's not as much as I expected but it is
a noticeable improvement.
 
Old typical el7 SSG build + validate times: 30-40 minutes.
New typical el7 SSG build + validate times: 20-30 minutes.
 
The next big optimization lies in getting better hardware for Jenkins.
`make jenkins` takes 2m16.877s on my work laptop and 20+ minutes on
the OS1 nodes. That is a huge difference. And my laptop can't be called
a powerful machine, it's just a dual core i7 laptop.


OS1 is being decommissioned over the coming months. I'm not sure what (if any) environment is taking over for that.

What kind of computing power do we need? Perhaps we could look into a Reserved Instance on EC2.