Hi there,
Do you spend HOURS every day AGONISING over how long run-tests.php takes
to complete?
Have you long since ABANDONED every test directory besides Zend/tests?
Does it feel like your eight CPU cores are pointlessly WASTED by
single-threaded PHP test execution?
Are you SADDENED every day at how high-quality the run-tests.php code
is, DREAMING of an even worse mess?
Then I've got just the trick for you!
…ahem. Okay, enough terrible salesmanship. I felt like parallelising
run-tests.php, so I did it. If you give it the flag -jX, it'll spawn X
worker processes and throw batches at tests at them, and those worker
processes will send back the results of tests for the parent process to
display and collate. To avoid potential problems with tests that step on
eachother's toes (i.e. access the same file or port or whatever), it
gives each worker a particular directory of tests and it then executes
those in parallel. Obviously, this means things aren't as parallel as
they could be for very large test directories (looking at you,
Zend/tests/…), though that's a solvable problem. :) Per a suggestion by
Rasmus in an earlier thread, the parent hands out large directories to
children first to reduce the time spent on children occupied with huge
directories.
And what a difference it makes. On my Ubuntu 16.04 VirtualBox VM running
inside Windows 10 Pro x64 on my Ryzen 1700 8-core 16-thread PC, here's
vanilla run-tests.php against master on a --disable-all build:
=====================================================================
TEST RESULT SUMMARY
Exts skipped : 68
Exts tested : 7
Number of tests : 15613 8481
Tests skipped : 7132 ( 45.7%) --------
Tests warned : 0 ( 0.0%) ( 0.0%)
Tests failed : 30 ( 0.2%) ( 0.4%)
Expected fail : 31 ( 0.2%) ( 0.4%)
Tests passed : 8420 ( 53.9%) ( 99.3%)
Time taken : 317 seconds
And here's run-tests.php -j16:
=====================================================================
TEST RESULT SUMMARY
Exts skipped : 68
Exts tested : 7
Number of tests : 15613 8481
Tests skipped : 7132 ( 45.7%) --------
Tests warned : 0 ( 0.0%) ( 0.0%)
Tests failed : 35 ( 0.2%) ( 0.4%)
Expected fail : 31 ( 0.2%) ( 0.4%)
Tests passed : 8415 ( 53.9%) ( 99.2%)
Time taken : 80 seconds
That's about a quarter of the single-threaded time. It could get even
better still if there were more test directories to work with; currently
the number of alive workers declines as the test run goes on, because
all the small directories get finished quickly and you're left waiting
on the Zend/tests-like behemoths. One idea might be to add some sort of
special file you could add to a directory which tells run-tests.php that
it is safe to parallelise, in which case it would break it into chunks
at runtime for you. Though I don't think we should have huge numbers of
files in a single directory anyway, if possible.
Okay, but what's the catch? Well, the code isn't the most… elegant
thing. I did make run-tests.php faster, but I didn't refactor it to be
less of a global-variables-dependant mess than it is at present, except
for moving all the top-level code into a single function for the sake of
my own sanity. Therefore, the worker child processes get their own copy
of the global state to initialise them. It's a bit hacky, but this is
basically what UNIX fork() does, so maybe I shouldn't feel so bad. ;) On
the other hand, the remainder of the design is quite elegant! It's all
clean message-passing over STDIN and STDOUT.
This isn't fully tested yet. I haven't actually investigated those 5
test failures, and my implementation probably breaks some run-tests.php
features right now. I also haven't bothered to try this on a non
--disable-all build yet. That said, I'm impressed how well it actually
works right now and how effectively it tolerates errors. The child
processes will even happily kill themselves if the parent does.
The code is here:
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/2822
Happy Halloween.
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/
Hi!
On 08/10/17 05:47, Andrea Faulds wrote:> Hi there,
Do you spend HOURS every day AGONISING over how long run-tests.php takes
to complete?
Yes!
Have you long since ABANDONED every test directory besides Zend/tests?
Does it feel like your eight CPU cores are pointlessly WASTED by
single-threaded PHP test execution?
Yes!
Are you SADDENED every day at how high-quality the run-tests.php code
is, DREAMING of an even worse mess?Then I've got just the trick for you!
Ha, welcome to the club! I'm glad someone else feels the need, too.
https://github.com/php/php-src/compare/master...m6w6:parallel-run-tests
But, I just noticed, you've been part of that discussion, too:
https://externals.io/message/75308
--
Regards,
Mike
Hi!
On 08/10/17 05:47, Andrea Faulds wrote:> Hi there,
Do you spend HOURS every day AGONISING over how long run-tests.php takes
to complete?
Yes!Have you long since ABANDONED every test directory besides Zend/tests?
Does it feel like your eight CPU cores are pointlessly WASTED by
single-threaded PHP test execution?
Yes!Are you SADDENED every day at how high-quality the run-tests.php code
is, DREAMING of an even worse mess?Then I've got just the trick for you!
Ha, welcome to the club! I'm glad someone else feels the need, too.
https://github.com/php/php-src/compare/master...m6w6:parallel-run-testsBut, I just noticed, you've been part of that discussion, too:
https://externals.io/message/75308--
Regards,
Mike
thanks for keeping the tradition of calling out the new participant about
the previous attempt :D
https://externals.io/message/75308#75321
--
Ferenc Kovács
@Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu
Hi!
Ferenc Kovacs wrote:
Hi!
On 08/10/17 05:47, Andrea Faulds wrote:> Hi there,
Then I've got just the trick for you!
Ha, welcome to the club! I'm glad someone else feels the need, too.
https://github.com/php/php-src/compare/master...m6w6:parallel-run-testsBut, I just noticed, you've been part of that discussion, too:
https://externals.io/message/75308--
Regards,
Mikethanks for keeping the tradition of calling out the new participant about
the previous attempt :D
https://externals.io/message/75308#75321
…oh dear.
Clearly, we need yet another attempt after mine :p
--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/
Have you long since ABANDONED every test directory besides
Zend/tests?
... or ran only eext/foo/tests ;)
…ahem. Okay, enough terrible salesmanship. I felt like
parallelising
run-tests.php, so I did it. If you give it the flag -jX, it'll spawn
X
worker processes and throw batches at tests at them, and those
worker
This is cool! I also see (from very very very) short look on the github
diff that you have a parallelization protection for some tests, which
might share resources. Very good!
Kind of unrelated: Somewhere on my 10+ years old todo list I also have
the item of using FastCGI or similar for running tests to avoid running
tthrough MINIT/MSHUTDOWN for each and every test (for some we can'T
avoid due to ini requirements, but well) maybe a less hackish way for
parallelizing might be using fpm workers and async io (just to spin the
idea, maybe somebody takes it up ...)
johannes
Hi Johannes,
Johannes Schlüter wrote:
Have you long since ABANDONED every test directory besides
Zend/tests?... or ran only eext/foo/tests ;)
…ahem. Okay, enough terrible salesmanship. I felt like
parallelising
run-tests.php, so I did it. If you give it the flag -jX, it'll spawn
X
worker processes and throw batches at tests at them, and those
workerThis is cool! I also see (from very very very) short look on the github
diff that you have a parallelization protection for some tests, which
might share resources. Very good!
I'm glad you like it! Although I discover now that I am hardly the first
to attempt this. Maybe I'll be the first to get it merged :p
Kind of unrelated: Somewhere on my 10+ years old todo list I also have
the item of using FastCGI or similar for running tests to avoid running
tthrough MINIT/MSHUTDOWN for each and every test (for some we can'T
avoid due to ini requirements, but well) maybe a less hackish way for
parallelizing might be using fpm workers and async io (just to spin the
idea, maybe somebody takes it up ...)
That's a reasonable idea. But I wonder if at that point, we should just
use a “real” unit-testing framework, or at least a stripped-down version
of one, which would run functions rather than files. PHPT is a simple
format, but it requires invoking a PHP interpreter every time. We only
really need to do that if we expect a fatal error or something like that… :)
--
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/
This is cool! I also see (from very very very) short look on the
github diff that you have a parallelization protection for some
tests, which might share resources. Very good!
I'm glad you like it! Although I discover now that I am hardly the
first to attempt this.
Hardly, aside from the mentioned one's Zoe once did a rewrite which
works parallel, phpUnit also has a phpt mode and I'm sue there are yet
others ;-)
Maybe I'll be the first to get it merged :p
Keep working to hat goal! We need it. (your marketing missed the gcov
run btw. :D)
Kind of unrelated: Somewhere on my 10+ years old todo list I also
have
the item of using FastCGI or similar for running tests to avoid
running
tthrough MINIT/MSHUTDOWN for each and every test (for some we can'T
avoid due to ini requirements, but well) maybe a less hackish way
for
parallelizing might be using fpm workers and async io (just to spin
the
idea, maybe somebody takes it up ...)
That's a reasonable idea. But I wonder if at that point, we should
just use a “real” unit-testing framework, or at least a stripped-down
version of one, which would run functions rather than files. PHPT is
a simple format, but it requires invoking a PHP interpreter every
time. We only really need to do that if we expect a fatal error or
something like that… :)
We need a PHP interpreter also for leaks, ini settings (we should
actually get rid of most of these ...), everything where we need a
clean space to register classes/functions/... or where shutdown
behavior is tested or so many else :-) (and yes, detecting leaks via
my fastcgi/fpm approach is not trivial, but might be doable with some
help from engine/sapi)
PHP has a nice mechanism for providing a clean environment, the RINIT-
SHUTDWN-cycle ... aka request :-)
Anyways, let's not get distracted and work on the proposal at hand and
then do the next iteration (... in ~20 years :-/ or can we speed up?)
johannes