[webkit-dev] The tree is on fire: a tragedy of the commons

[Adam Barth]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Alex Milowski <alex at milowski.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 8:19 AM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:24 AM, Alex Milowski <alex at milowski.com> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:12 AM, Alex Milowski <alex at milowski.com> wrote:
>>>>>> The only EWS which requires committer access is Mac-EWS.  All other
>>>>>> EWS bots will run any patch.
>>>>>
>>>>> Why is that?   That's the platform I'm most interested in see run.
>>>>
>>>> Various reasons.  Mostly due to our current hardware setup.  If
>>>> someone has some mac hardware they'd like to donate to the cause it
>>>> would be most welcome.
>>>
>>> That seems really, really solvable.
>>
>> The core issue here is that the license for Mac OS X prevents us from
>> running the OS in a virtual machine.  The way we protect ourselves
>> from random folks haxoring the EWS on Linux is by running them on EC2
>> and re-imagining the machines periodically.
>
> So, it is possible to run Mac OS X on a virtual machine:

Oh, awesome!

> The real issue is you can't run this in the cloud like on an EC2 server
> because of the hardware restriction in Apple's license, right?

EC2 has support for Linux and Windows, but not Mac.  I have been
meaning to set up a Windows box, but I haven't gotten around to it
yet.  If you know of a cloud provider that has Mac, we can set up the
mac-ews there.

>> If you'd like to donate hardware that you're willing to have random
>> folks run code on, please let me or Eric know and we'll show you how
>> to get the mac-ews up and running.
>>
>
> I have limited bandwidth where I'm at and so hosting something, while
> possible, needs careful consideration.  I've contemplated running something
> like EWS for my own work so I'd be interested in learning how this work.

Amazon tells me that our current bots use about 4 GB/month of download
bandwidth and 600 MB/month of upload bandwidth.  I presume almost all
of the bandwidth is to update the working copies of the four bots
hosted there.

> ...but will just one server out there somewhere solve this problem?  Don't
> we need several?

It depends on how beefy your server it, but one server is probably
fine.  The current mac-ews is running on one machine and has no
trouble keeping up with the load.

Adam