[Insight-developers] Tips for faster testing?

[David Cole]

Your observation is correct: ctest measures the amount of time the tests
take when it runs, and caches the timing data in a file in the build tree.
Then, to make the best use of the available processors, it runs the tests
"longest running" first, so all of the tests at the end of the run are the
quick running ones, and the finish is very quick compared to the start...

Glad it sped things up for you.


David


On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Cory Quammen <cquammen at cs.unc.edu> wrote:

> David,
>
> Thanks, for the information. I tried ctest -j 4, but I think I
> prematurely abandoned it because it seemed that it was taking longer
> than a serial run. However, running through a full run, I see now that
> it somehow seems to run the longest running tests first and then the
> faster tests, so I wrongly jumped to the conclusion that something was
> wrong with the parallel tests.
>
> For the curious, here are my results with a debug build:
>
> ctest: 27 minutes
> ctest -j 4: 10 minutes
> ctest -j 8: 10 minutes
>
> Indeed, the -j 4 option speeds things up nicely, but there is no
> benefit to use -j 8 on my machine.
>
> - Cory
>
> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 10:53 AM, David Cole <david.cole at kitware.com>
> wrote:
> > ctest -j 4
> > (or even higher... you may even find ctest -j 8 works well on a quad core
> > machine...)
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Cory Quammen <cquammen at cs.unc.edu>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> When I run ITK tests on a Mac, I usually just run ctest with no
> >> arguments or 'make ExperimentalTest'.
> >>
> >> Is there a better way to run tests that more fully utilizes my
> >> quad-core Mac to get tests to complete faster?
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Cory
> >>
> >> --
> >> Cory Quammen
> >> Computer Integrated Systems for Microscopy and Manipulation (CISMM)
> >> Department of Computer Science
> >> University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
> >> http://www.cs.unc.edu/~cquammen
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>
>
>
> --
> Cory Quammen
> Computer Integrated Systems for Microscopy and Manipulation (CISMM)
> Department of Computer Science
> University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
> http://www.cs.unc.edu/~cquammen
>
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