Re: [JGIT PATCH 0/4] RepositoryTestCase cleanups

Robin Rosenberg [off-list ref] wrote:

Ok, so here is an attempt to improve the ability of the JGit's unit
tests to delete temporary repositories. This has probably been seen
by many, but Jonas Fonseca raised the issue.

Hmpph.  This takes 19 seconds to run the suite, where it used to be
only 2 seconds on the same system.  The slower run isn't something
I'm too happy about, actually I'd like to make the run even faster
than 2 seconds.
 

The background is that on Windows you cannot delete files that are
open and mmapped files are open until they get unmapped, which in
Java is beyond explicit programmer control. You can only free the
resources and pray that the GC does the work. Fortunately it usually
does. It turned out our testcases weren't even trying to clean up
properly. 

If the issue is mmap'd files, why don't we instead disable mmap
on Windows during JUnit tests, and use the non-mmap variant of
pack access?  At least do that for the bulk of the tests, and
then have a single test case which tests the mmap code path but
has careful System.gc calls in place to try and ensure we can
actually clean up the temporary files.

Another option is to refactor the Repository class a little so we
can replace local filesystem IO with something else, like say an
in-core repository.  E.g. a pack file and/or pack index stored in
a byte[], and refs stored in a HashMap.  We'd still need a couple
of tests to verify local disk IO, but many of the tests can be
validated against such a pure in-memory Repository concept.

I'd actually like to get that Repository refactoring done soon,
someone else was asking about it for the RefDatabase (to store the
refs in a SQL database so JGit ties into JTA) but I may also want
it for Gerrit 2 - I'm looking at doing something that would put
200,000 refs per year into a repository.  That's so large that
most operations can't afford to scan the entire ref database,
and it really cannot be loose.  ;-)


Refactoring repository is a fair chunk of work, disabling the mmap
feature under Windows in JUnit may be easier.  Hmm, according to
WindowCache's <clinit> its default by false.  Why is it enabling
on Windows?  The only code that calls WindowCache.reconfigure()
is in the Eclipse plugin, so pure JGit unit tests shouldn't be
turning on mmap code *at all*.

Which also points out a gap in our tests.  Nothing new, we have
lots of gaps.  *sigh*

-- 
Shawn.