Re: valgrind patches, was Re: What's cooking in git.git (Jan 2009, #04; Mon, 19)

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 03:50:28PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> > How will you deal with race conditions between two simultaneously 
> > running scripts? I.e., where are you going to put it?
> 
> There are no race conditions, as for every git executable, a symbolic link 
> is created, pointing to the valgrind.sh script [*1*].

Hmm. I suppose that would work, since every test run is trying to create
the same state.

> Besides, what with valgrind being a memory hog, you'd be nuts to call 
> valgrinded scripts simultaneously.

I have to disagree there. I think there are two obvious usage patterns:

  - run script $X specifically under valgrind to track down a bug

  - run the whole test suite under valgrind occasionally to find
    latent bugs that wouldn't otherwise show up

In the latter, you want a pretty beefy box.  When I did the original
patches, I ran through the whole test suite under valgrind. It took
several hours on a 6GB quad-core box, using "-j4". I would hate for it
to have taken an entire day. :)

-Peff