[Cdash] Database performance

[Tim Gallagher]

Hi,

We have the following setup for tests in our code:

    foreach(TESTCASE ${LESLIE_AVAILABLE_TESTCASES})
      set(CTEST_CONFIGURE_COMMAND "./setup.py -t ${TESTCASE} '{${LESLIE_CONFIGURE_DICT_BASE}}'")
      ctest_configure(BUILD "${CTEST_REPO_DIRECTORY}" APPEND)
      set(CTEST_BUILD_COMMAND "./setup.py -t ${TESTCASE} '{${LESLIE_BUILD_DICT_BASE}}'")
      ctest_build(BUILD "${CTEST_REPO_DIRECTORY}" APPEND)
      ctest_submit(PARTS Configure Build)
    endforeach()

Each build process generates something like 20K of data based on the output from CTest. After about 10 test cases, the submissions begin to time-out with:

   Error when uploading file: /data/CTestScripts/leslie-release/leslie-TestData/Testing/20120127-0230/Build.xml
   Error message was: Operation too slow. Less than 1 bytes/sec transfered the last 120 seconds

When looking at the processes running on the server during this time, postgresql is busy running UPDATE and it takes progressively longer each time a submission comes in. There are over 200 tests, so only making it through 10 is a problem. 

Are there any suggestions on how to improve the performance here? Is this a problem with postgresql or with the SQL statements CDash uses? Has anybody come across this?

Tim