Re: [PATCH] Improve and extend test cond5.test.

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 10:32:02PM CEST:
> At Thursday 24 June 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> >  Do you have an old system?
> Well, it's not new :-) 
> 
> $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
> model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+

> $ free | awk '(NR == 2) { print $2 }'
> 774904

Hehe.
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.80GHz
1035964

The RAM upgrade helped wonders.

> >  What was
> >  the highest $try that you needed, 30 seems a bit excessive, no?
> I preferred to err on the side of caution.  After all, if the test 
> script works correctly, it exits much earlier than after 30 tries 
> (usually 1 try is enough).  Also, I'm not expecting to see the bug it 
> looks for cropping up often, so even if the test takes 5 minutes in 
> the unlikely situation of a bug's reapperence, that's not a problem 
> IMHO.

Agreed.

> > I wonder what the current lower bound on PID reuse is on systems. 
> >  There are certainly systems which use only 32K PIDs, and process
> >  creation can easily be thousand per second.  I hope that 10
> >  seconds are still safe.
> I think that the possibility of a spurious failure here is very very 
> low.  But I might be wrong, and it would fine by me having, say, 100 
> tries every 3 seconds instead of 30 tries every 10 seconds.  Your 
> call.

Just to avoid a possible misunderstanding here: the issue I want to
avoid is that we kill an unrelated process due to PID reuse.  That would
be ugly.  Of course, 10 s is already better than 60 s.

Oh well, let's just take your values for now.

Cheers,
Ralf