nodejs / nodejs/build

Improve concurrency of build processes on AIX machines.

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platform:aix
Dominant language
Jinja
Stars
542
Forks
185
Avg merge
22h 15m
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Description

Many of our current AIX machines have significant processing power and RAM (Most are 4-core with SMT8) and 32GiB if RAM. We are currently throttling some of them to -j8 or lower which means the machines are likely to be underutilised relative to their ability:

https://github.com/nodejs/build/blob/7d8af5b858e3e6b22b198e4091a09ecc32bc7cb2/ansible/inventory.yml#L122

This issue will cover experimenting to see if we can increase this, as duering some recent testing I have been running directly on the machine with values of -j16 without issues (Noting that it's also possible that running through jenkins has different effects...)

The limitations were initially put in due to the analysis in https://github.com/nodejs/build/issues/2566 and then added to our automation in https://github.com/nodejs/build/pull/2574 - it's not clear which versions of Node were affected but I will also try node.js 22 to cover both ends of what we are supporting. I will also note that the specific machine which was listed as failing with anything greater than 3 is currently offline.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with ansible/inventory.yml at the referenced AIX machine entry, then review the analysis in issue #2566 and automation changes from pull request #2574. Compare direct and Jenkins-driven builds at higher concurrency using the supported Node.js versions, including Node.js 22. Done means establishing a safe AIX concurrency setting and applying it to the build automation if testing supports the change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
node.js
Domain
build-system, ci-cd, infrastructure
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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