[cross-project-issues-dev] Hudson job polling tips

[Thanh Ha <thanh.ha@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Everyone,

Occasionally we see Hudson jobs configured for polling which are far too 
aggressive by polling every minute. If your polling job looks like this 
"* * * * *" it is configured to poll every minute. You should instead 
consider configuring your job using the Hudson built in @hourly, @daily, 
etc... which will set up a more reasonable polling interval. However if 
you do require a smaller polling interval consider setting it to 5, 10 
or 15 minutes to give your job a chance to finish polling from the last 
polling attempt instead of polling every minute.

For example:

*/5 * * * *   # for 5 minutes
*/10 * * * *  # for 10 minutes
*/15 * * * *  # for 15 minutes


Another tip I wanted to mention was about using the file system instead 
of the git web URLs such as git://, ssh://, http://. The Hudson servers 
are configured with the same mount points as build.eclipse.org so you 
can actually poll from git at the file system level. For example instead 
of using:

git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/cbi/org.eclipse.cbi.maven.plugins.git

You can simply use /gitroot/cbi/org.eclipse.cbi.maven.plugins.git as 
your git clone URL. This will cause your job to poll directly from the 
file system and not cause any additional network connection to occur and 
saving our services from the extra polling load. As an example our CBI 
project build jobs are configured to pull from the file system level 
URLs [1] (Committers at Eclipse can login and see the job configuration).

Hope this helps,


Thanh

[1] https://hudson.eclipse.org/cbi/job/cbi-maven-plugins-build/