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Bug 343297 - Hardware/Software differences between epwin2 and epwin3 and effects on performance tests
Summary: Hardware/Software differences between epwin2 and epwin3 and effects on perfor...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Platform
Classification: Eclipse Project
Component: Releng (show other bugs)
Version: 3.7   Edit
Hardware: PC Windows 7
: P3 normal (vote)
Target Milestone: ---   Edit
Assignee: Kim Moir CLA
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Reported: 2011-04-19 14:03 EDT by Oleg Besedin CLA
Modified: 2012-03-23 15:05 EDT (History)
4 users (show)

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Description Oleg Besedin CLA 2011-04-19 14:03:46 EDT
What exactly are the differences in hardware and software between Windows performance test machines epwin2 and epwin3?

For most performance tests CPU & Elapsed timing between those machines are very close and within normal test variability.

Some test however, show puzzling differences with epwin3 being 2 to 10 *times* slower then epwin2:

- 10 times slower: UI's OpenCloseViewTest#showView:BookmarkView()
- 3 times slower:  ANT's SeparateVMTests#testBuildWithLotsOfLinks() 
- 2 times slower: SWT's Draw strings using GC.drawString()
... and many more.

From the descriptions, test machines are supposed to be identical. Both supposed to be WinXP 2 x 3.00GHz - 3GB RAM, it is unclear if both machines use Sun 1.6.0_17 or one uses Sun 1.5?

This needs to be cleared up as we are spending significant amount of effort based on those performance numbers.
Comment 1 Oleg Besedin CLA 2011-04-19 14:08:23 EDT
(And, by the way, if two machines are identical why we are running tests on both?)

Suggestions on actions:

(a) Decommission epwin3 and forget about it
(b) Run Windows benchmark software on both machines and compare results  
(c) Get a complete list of hardware pieces on both machines and see if there are differences
(d) Run whatever tests are available for both machines to ascertain that epwin3 does not have a hardware problem
Comment 2 Boris Bokowski CLA 2011-04-19 15:06:46 EDT
Is the graphics card the same on both machines?
Comment 3 Kim Moir CLA 2011-04-19 15:14:31 EDT
As far as I know they are the same hardware.  I'll ask Karl (our sysadmin) if the patch level is the same.  They both run the tests on the same VMs.

The reason that we have two machines is that Frederic wanted two as a sanity check. If one machine had strange results, you could look to the other machine. I agree that the test results are inconsistent and it wastes a time.  As an aside, he rebooted both machines yesterday and applied patches so the machines should (in theory :-) be in a consistent state for today's build.
Comment 4 Dani Megert CLA 2011-04-20 02:12:03 EDT
Looking at the Java system properties there is a difference: on 'epwin2' the java.library.path has this additional entry: "C:\\buildtest\\jdk6_04\\bin" at the end.

No idea whether this affects the result or not.
Comment 5 Oleg Besedin CLA 2011-04-20 15:07:10 EDT
What was the last time clean images had been installed on those machines? Is ti possible to re-image them in time for M7 milestone week? If not, RC1?
Comment 6 Kim Moir CLA 2011-04-20 15:26:07 EDT
We don't reimage the machines anymore.  IT doesn't provide the facilities for us to reimage the machines anymore.
Comment 7 Kim Moir CLA 2012-03-23 15:05:54 EDT
Doesn't apply anymore.  We are moving the build to eclipse.org hardware.