[Gluster-devel] Performance Translators' Stability and Usefulness - Regression test outline

[Mickey Mazarick]

Oh don't get me wrong I'm not ANTI-unit testing at all. I actually 
haven't had a server daemon crash since 1.4. I'm still leaving my cron 
jobs in. Try as I might I just don't care very much about the 1.5 gigs 
of memory the server process is using.

My point isn't to open up a who pragmatic vs perfection argument here.
We can't really write unit tests; it's going to be up to the 
developers.  What we CAN come up with is a top down approach to testing 
our own setup and exposing integration problems which are going to be 
more of an issue for a project of this type. I would like to see some 
effort towards creating a unified way for us to do testing that will be 
meaningful and ensure stability for our given setup.

As to a logging translator how would that differ from the trace? Perhaps 
a more terse human-readable output.


-Mic


Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On 07/07/2009 19:38, Mickey Mazarick wrote:
>
>> Since I'm running my setup as a storage farm it just doesn't matter to
>> me if there's a memory leak of if a server daemon crashes, I have cron
>> jobs that restart it and I barely take notice.
>
> Ouch, ouch, ouch. That sounds like a monumental bodge. If somebody 
> working for me implemented that kind of a "solution" for a frequently 
> occuring problem in a production environment, they'd be finding 
> themselves looking for a new job pretty quickly. Most likely along 
> with the architect who trialed the solution before putting it into 
> production without finding the problems that require such a solution. 
> Solution to crashing processes is fixing the bug that causes them to 
> crash, not a wrapper that gets them restarted.
>
>> True a regression testing
>> would get rid of the memory leak you hate but if they have to start from
>> the ground up I would rather encourage the dev team to add hotadd
>> upgrade and hotadd features. These things would keep my cluster going
>> even if there were catastrophic problems.
>
> The _LAST_ thing Gluster needs at the moment is more features. Lack of 
> stability loses you customers much faster than extra features gain them.
>
>> What I'm saying is that a good top down testing system is something we
>> can discuss here, spec out and perhaps create independently of the
>> development team. I think what most people want is a more stable product
>> and I think a top down approach will get it there faster than trying to
>> implement a given UT system from the bottom up. It will defiantly answer
>> the question "should I upgrade to this release?"
>
> IMO, a top down approach merely glazes over the more fundamental 
> problems. You cannot engineer quality from the top down. You design 
> from top down, but quality comes from bottom up.
>
> Gordan
>
>
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