Build servers offline due to failed SSD

[Ryan Schmidt]

There was some additional downtime in the last few days but the buildmaster now has a permanent home on a new SSD and is faster than ever. Builds that could not be scheduled during recent downtime have been rescheduled and are in progress.


On Mar 14, 2021, at 04:02, Vincent Habchi wrote:

> Wouldn’t it make sense to use some sort of RAM caching to speed up builds instead of SSD? What’s the point of using a permanent storage device for something that is bound to be erased in a very short time?

RAM would be faster than SSD but also a lot more expensive. Certainly I know or can figure out how to create a RAM disk, and certainly we could tell MacPorts to store the build directory there. But if we ran out of space on the RAM disk during a build, the build would fail. Some builds need a lot of disk space -- I've seen ports that use 20GB of disk space to build. Instead of buying 20GB or more of additional RAM per VM, I've chosen to buy 90GB of SSD per VM.

If you're suggesting that we should just set aside 1-2GB of RAM for build files and use the SSD if we need more space than that, then I don't know how to set that up.

Note that macOS already caches disk files in RAM if there is any free RAM.