742085 - Reduce forking in the jstest suite

Status: NEW

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Terrence Cole [:terrence]]

Our test suite has ~7000 tests.  Even if forking overhead is small, this is quite cumbersome.

We should investigate adding a special "test mode" to the shell which will, for example, read lines from stdin and create a new runtime for each input, rather than running one test and exiting.

Comment 1

[David Mandelin [:dmandelin]]

Gregory Szorc filed a bug a while back with a prototype C++ test runner. One issue he identified was that you need to handle the case where a test crashes and somehow restart the test harness.

Comment 2

[Sean Stangl [:sstangl]]

It may be easier to just augment the harness to run multiple tests in parallel, a -j# flag.

Comment 3

[Nicolas B. Pierron [:nbp]]

(In reply to David Mandelin from comment #1)
> Gregory Szorc filed a bug a while back with a prototype C++ test runner. One
> issue he identified was that you need to handle the case where a test
> crashes and somehow restart the test harness.

We can create a file which contains the argument vector of the shell, and separate each vector by a double \0, each shell (because we also want multiple instances) can lock the file, read the last argv, truncate the file, release the lock and continue with the runtime.

I think we can also use a socket where the python script is running the shell in parallel and work with some-kind of message passing system and report status of execution.