Jenkins agents slow - performance

My Jenkins builds are 5 to 20 times slower on my build agents while using Jenkins and as compared to
- running the build in command line on the build agents
- running the build on my workstation
What can be causing the issue? I have attempted to add memory to the environments and also set env variable JENKINS_JAVA_OPTIONS to -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=4096m
no change at all. Are Jenkins agents very slow or am I missing sth?
note that both environments tested against have more CPU and memory than needed (8 to 24G) etc. again running the build in command line works as fast as expected.

Related

drone.io how to run command on local server

I have drone installed on a Mac mini as a CI/CD for Android and iOS apps. To build for iOS I need to run commands on the server itself. I know there is a ssh plugin, but is there another way to run commands on the host from a drone pipeline step?
I would suggest taking a look at the exec runner, sounds like exactly what you would need.
The Exec runner executes build pipelines directly on the host machine without isolation, using the default shell. This runner is not suitable for un-trusted workloads for security reasons.
https://exec-runner.docs.drone.io/

Jenkins job windows batch execution 20 times slower than executing in cmd.exe

I just installed Jenkins 2.46.2 on a Windows 2012 Server \o/. It runs as a system service.
I created a job that execute a windows batch (.bat) script to build a code project. This batch results in executing 2 mingw32-make.exe commands to clean and then build a full binary from source code.
Executing the batch manually on the machine, located on the same filesystem (same workspace as used by the Jenkins' job, local disk - not network disk), the clean-build takes ~50 seconds.
But when executed by Jenkins, the job takes more than 20x more time longer! (~19 minutes). It terminates succesfully with the same behavior as executed manually in cmd.exe.
I changed the launch arguments for the jvm in the jenkins.xml file with "-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m" options as I have read in the documentation to improve performance. But it does not fix anything :-(
Also when I monitors the CPU/disk/RAM usages they all stay very very low while building, so I deduce that brute performances of the machine are not in cause.
Whether I invoke the batch with call statement in the Jenkins job build step or not does not change anything : the job always last 19 minutes.
Can anybody help me to investigate why so slowness ?
Thanks in advance :)
I had a similar problem. I noticed that .bat files with echo Hello World ran fast and with no problem.
But once I tried to launch any grep.exe from a batch script, it took 24 seconds (in my case) to run even with no input files. If launched manually it finishes in no time.
I used grep.exe version 2.5.4 from MSys 1.0 distribution.
The solution in my case was rather unexpected - I updated grep to version 2.24, and now, being launched from Jenkins, it takes less than one second to process over 1 MB log file.
For a couple of day investigation, I finally find the cause.
In my case, it is the reason of Jenkins agent.
When I install Jenkins agent as a windows service in the slave agent, the consuming time is so huge,but when I try to start Jenkins agent via windows command line, the consuming time is as normal as executing the batch file manually.
My env:
master: CentOS7
slave agent: win 7
And I also test this case in a slave agent of win 10 for comparison.
The time executing via Jenkins is approximately the same as executing the batch file manually on the agent machine.
So I guess this is the compatibility issue between win 7 and Jenkins.
But for that the Jenkins official said that Jenkins not support win 7 anymore (Microsoft does not support Windows 7), we temporarily put it aside.
Anyway we find a way to conquer this. Hope this will help you for similar scenario.

Using a Windows VM from Jenkins through vsphere

I'm trying to reset-and-launch a Windows VM (in vsphere) during a Jenkins job. I successfully installed the vSphere Cloud Plugin. I've followed instructions to setup the Windows machine as a jenkins-mvn-slave, and have it setup to run as a service.
If I click on the button in Jenkins for Launch Slave Agent, I can see (in vsphere) that the VM does a revert snapshot, and then it does a power on virtual machine. If I attach to the machine, I can see that the Jenkins service starts automatically. However, back in Jenkins, it tells me that the Slave did not come online in allowed time.
Some key settings for my slave:
Force VM launch: Checked
Wait for VMTools: Not checked
Delay between launch and boot complete: 120
Secondary launch method: Launch slave agents view Java Web Start
Versions:
Jenkins: 1.596.2
vSphere: 5.5.0
Windows: Server 2012 R2 Standard, Build 9600
vSphere plugin: 2.7
What am I missing?
I've done a lot of messing around since I posted, but I think the following is what I was doing wrong. I first got the VM working as a normal slave agent. Once I had that working, then I tried to setup the same as a vsphere-cloud-slave-agent. I wasn't realizing that setting up a host as a slave agent is "agent-name specific".
So, I uninstalled the Jenkins service, launched the "vsphere cloud slave agent", logged into the machine, and ran javaws (as specified in the previously mentioned instructions.
A couple of other gotchas that I encountered (not relevant to the initial post, but maybe relevant to someone who reads this):
I originally installed git with a password manager. Unfortunately, since jenkins jobs aren't interactive, it was hanging on the git clone command. I tried uninstalling and re-installing git, but it didn't fix the problem for whatever user the jenkins slave was running as. I ended up having to revert to a previous slave image and install git from there. (I probably could have also figured out what user was running the jenkins slave, and entered the desired password there.)
I wanted to run a clean VM for each job. I never figured out this one. If I set Availability to Take this slave on-line when in demand and off-line when idle, that was a good start. However, if I set the times to 0 and 0, then the machine was constantly rebooting. If I set the times to 1 and 1, then the machine does mostly what I want, unless there are back-to-back jobs queued to run.

Jenkins: Start remote VM and keep it running

I am trying to get Jenkins to start a virtual machine on a Jenkins slave. The VM itself will then act as a Jenkins slave.
In order to do so I need to boot the VM and keep it running, even after the Jenkins job terminates. I have tried to create a freestyle project which runs a batch script on the slave and checks if the VM is running:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmrun.exe" -T ws start "D:\VM\MyVM.vmx"
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmrun.exe" list
The second command shows me that the VM is actually up and running, but apparently it directly shuts down again since I can't see the node that corresponds to the VM as online.
The Jenkins Slave agent is installed as a Windows service on the VM's host and logs in as a domain user.
If I switch the first command to
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware.exe" -x "D:\VM\MyVM.vmx"
the VM powers on, the node gets connected to Jenkins. This is because somehow the batch script gets stuck after this command and does not terminate, so the VM remains powered on. However, if I log on the host with the same user the Jenkins service uses, I cannot see the VM running.
Ironically, I can in fact power OFF any virtual machine that I have started locally on the host from Jenkins by creating a project with the batch command
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmrun.exe" -T ws stop "D:\VM\MyVM.vmx" soft
So, to summarize:
I want to create a Jenkins job that powers on a VM so I can use it as a slave agent. The VM has to remain powered on even after the job is done, I will shut it down with a different job as needed.
But only the shutdown job is working as intended.
try to start your VM with START command:
START "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmrun.exe" -T ws start "D:\VM\MyVM.vmx"
After playing around with VMs and Jenkins today I learned that vmrun works perfectly if the Jenkins slave does not run as a Windows service but is launched via the Java Webstart application.
Besides, one can prevent processes from getting killed by altering the BUILD_ID env. variable since Jenkins is using this variable to track the processes the build launched. So by changing the value of BUILD_ID before spawning processes they won't get killed after the Job finishes.

Teamcity thinks agent is running a build, but it is not

Using teamcity 5.1 (build 13360)
Usually everything works as expected
Occasionally it gets into a state where the server runs a build and it thinks the agent is running it, but the agent doesn't actually run the build
I see no sign of the build being run by the agent in its logs
So the build just runs forever on the server
I have restarted agents and the server
So it appears it recovers after a few hours
I just left a build running and it completed after a while
Don't know if restarting server / agents helped or not

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