Re: [HACKERS] Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Remove pgbench "progress" test pending solution of its timing is (fwd)

Fabien COELHO <coelho@cri.ensmp.fr> writes:
> Attached is an attempt at improving the situation:

I took a quick look at this and can't really convince myself that it
improves our situation.  The fact that it prints nothing if the runtime
is outside of a tightly constrained range seems likely to hide the sort
of bug you might hope such a test would detect.  A simple example is
that, if there's an off-by-one bug causing the test to run for 3 seconds
not 2, this test script won't complain about it.  Worse, if pgbench dumps
core instantly on startup when given -p, this test script won't complain
about it.  And the test is of no value at all on very slow buildfarm
critters such as valgrind or clobber-cache-always animals.

> (2) the test now only expects "progress: \d" from the output, so it is enough 
> that one progress is shown, whenever it is shown.

Hm.  Could we get somewhere by making the test look for that, and
adjusting the loop logic inside pgbench so that (maybe only with the
tested switch values) it's guaranteed to print at least one progress
output regardless of timing, because it won't check for exit until after
it's printed a log message?

> For the random-ness related test (--sample-rate), we could add a feature to 
> pgbench which allows to control the random seed, so that the number of samples
> could be known in advance for testing purposes.

Don't see how locking down the seed gets us anywhere.  The behavior of
random() can't be assumed identical across different machines, even
with the same seed.

			regards, tom lane