[arch-dev-public] New build server in the US?

[Florian Pritz]

On 18.04.2018 13:27, Baptiste Jonglez wrote:
> OSUOSL [1] in the US has several "new" refurb servers with dual Xeon E5-2660.
> Each machine has a total of 16 cores / 32 threads and 140 GB RAM, so that
> would make nice build machines.
> 
> Would this be useful to the dev community?  Soyuz is a bit overloaded at
> times, and people in the US/Canada might appreciate the lower latency.

We already have a second build server (sgp.pkgbuild.com) which is hardly
used. Souyz is really used quite a bit, but in general it has quite some
resources left to spare. I guess it depends on what you want and when.
Do you want to get builds done quickly (like on a local machine) or are
you happy with waiting until the machine is free? Maybe someone wants to
work on a system that allows to pause builds if people don't care when
they finish so that those that want them done quickly get priority? That
way we could possibly use our available resources better. Maybe it's
even as simple as queuing builds, but I don't know how long the builds
that people run on soyuz take. If a single build takes an hour, queuing
won't really work.

Some feedback on how people use soyuz would probably help a lot here.
What are your build times, how quickly do you want the result, do you
need to see live output, does the latency to the machine matter
(interactive usage?), ...?

Is anyone interested in taking on this project and maybe also setting
up/maintaining some build service if that turns out to be a good idea?

Regarding the OSUOSL idea: I'm slightly against getting machines from
yet another organisation. While it doesn't matter much during normal
operation, fixing problems is usually more difficult because things like
getting a live system booted, getting serial console access or even just
getting support are often not easily possible when servers are hosted at
companies that don't see hosting as a core goal. We've had this happen
before and it's not great. I don't know what the situation is for this
offer, but let's not rush into creating even more work for us.

> I honestly have no idea about Arch's financial situation, or how soyuz is
> paid for in practice.

Soyuz is a rented server at hetzner.de (like all our other important
servers) and payed for with donation funds.

Looking at a recent treasury report from SPI[1] we have around $47k
right now and looking back a few months, it seems to be growing.

[1] http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2018-April/003845.html

Florian

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