An ode to our testers

You know about those guys that use your software against huge datasets like their entire filesystem, with thousands of files?

We do. His name is Tshepang Lekhonkhobe and we owe him a few beers for reporting to us many scalability issues.

Today we found and fixed such a scalability issue: the update query to reset the availability of file resources (this is for support for removable media) was causing at least a linear increase of VmRss usage per amount of file resources. For Tshepang’s situation that meant 600 MB of VmRss. Jürg reduced this to 30 MB of peak VmRss in the same use-case, and a performance improvement from minutes to a second or two, three. Without memory fragmentation as glibc is returning almost all of the VmRss back to the kernel.

Thursday is our usual release day. I invite all of the 0.7 pioneers to test us with your huge filesystems, just like Tshepang always does.

So long and thanks for all the testing, Tshepang! I’m glad we finally found it.

8 thoughts on “An ode to our testers”

  2. Oh, okay, a few cocktails then? Wine? I don’t like beer either, so that’s great :). Which conferences are you attending, if any?

  4. Yes! Good testers are a very, very rare breed. It takes a particular kind of mind to prod and poke software to see how it breaks and then to do it again and report it in a way that a developer can reproduce it.

  5. I am really happy to hear that you value the wk done by people willing to run your test releases. You also blog frequently as a team on Tracker to encourage excitement.

    However testing still requires the distribution to ship your test releases which I am unaware of any major distributions doing or you have to provide such builds yourself. The only alternative is for the tester to actively follow the error prone path of pulling and building the software himself.

    It would be nice if you ensured the presence of at least a well maintained ppa for Ubuntu (support for the current development and current stable release is vital here).

    I would personally love to invest significant time testing tracker, but I am currently held back by a desire not to use gcc as a screensaver. I ceased using Gentooa long time ago.

    Thank you for your hard work and your time.

  6. @David Nielsen: I think mbiebl has packages for Debian, and I think there’s another guy doing such packages for Ubuntu. And also one for Fedora, and one for OpenSUSE. The core team is also making Maemo6 packages for which you can find the “debian/” subdir in the branch harmattan on our gitorious repository.

    I must admit that I’m not tracking everybody’s moves on who is doing what wrt packaging.

    That’s probably because I only have one or two major platforms that I develop on myself, and using the packaged Tracker isn’t very helpful when being involved in its development.

    I’ll ping some people about your comment, and hopefully they’ll give you some more info.

  7. @Philip Paeps: Exactly, and that’s why my ode to Tshepang. The bug he encountered was a very interesting one. And Tshepang cooperated really good with us: running valgrind, gdb, etc. We’re lucky to have such good pioneering testers.

Comments are closed.