OSX builds extremely slow to start

[awnumar]

Recently I added OSX to my project's testing cycle. Previous to the change, the entire test took about 30 seconds to start, run everything, and report back. Now it takes about half an hour before even starting the build. Upon clicking the build status and going to the log, I get a message of "Hang tight, the log cannot be shown until the build has started.", while the Linux build has already completed and passed a long time ago.

Any help?

[ItsHarper]

Look at the status page. While the number of running Linux jobs fluctuates constantly as new VMs are created and destroyed, the number of running Mac jobs stays almost constant, which results in a big backlog. I'm sure this has to do with Mac builds having to be run on real Mac hardware. Unfortunately, this is just a thing we have to live with.

[awnumar]

@noahAndrews Ah right. I should hack checked that.

Closing this thread. Feel free to reopen if you feel this is a problem that needs to be addressed.

[weitjong]

I think since the slow start is a norm rather than an exception these days then perhaps travis-build should have two job queues, i.e. one queue dedicated for osx and the other one for the rest. For example, if we have 3 queued jobs for osx and 30 queued jobs for Linux; and when there is huge backlog for osx, then on the Linux side travis-build should still give us 5 concurrent build at a time to clear the 30 queued jobs. Currently it would just give us 2 (i.e. 5 - 3) concurrent build at a time. In a nutshell, our build on the Linux side is being penalized by the huge osx backlog, which is not fair at all.

[AnthonyOliveri]

For me, this is a serious issue and has a huge impact on my productivity with my Xcode projects. This has been an issue for the past few months that I've been using Travis, and has been steadily getting worse. My builds are now taking 3 hours on average to get started.

Can someone from the Travis team explain any plans to ameliorate this situation? There is clearly a huge demand for Mac builds, with not nearly enough hardware to support it.

[awnumar]

Keeping in mind that this is a brilliant service provided for free, the OSX build speed really is getting to the point where it's past annoying and just counterproductive. I think everyone would appreciate a comment from the Travis team about whether this is likely to be fixed, when and how.

[AnthonyOliveri]

I agree that we should be grateful that we get these builds for free, but I was told that even paid versions do nothing to speed up Mac builds. Can anyone confirm or deny that this is the case?

[scottrhoyt]

I can confirm that on a paid plan it still takes my builds about 15 - 60 minutes to start during peak times (pretty much US business hours). They start quicker off-peak but that is only marginally helpful to us. It is a becoming a big productivity drain. This is particularly true when we have many PRs that get opened simultaneously. Travis's feature of building every PR (which I love) results in non-linear growth of your build queue as you begin merging them. We have begun to be conscious of how many PRs we leave open at once for this reason, which is another hit to organization and productivity.

[loint]

OSX very slow from start. After booting then it's in queue now. Any idea help to solve it for travis-ci.com because it's a paid service. Can not be slow by anyway !!! 👎

[loint]

@AnthonyOliveri Agree with you too.

[joshk]

Hi Everyone

I'm sorry for the issues you have experienced with jobs taking a long time to start.

From some of the comments in this thread, I think there might be a confusion between travis-ci.org and travis-ci.com. I wanted to try and clear up some of this confusion, or at least try to understand it better :)

The Mac queues for travis-ci.org and travis-ci.com are separate in terms of provisioned capacity, but use the same underlying infrastructure. We make sure we have enough provisioned capacity for our customers on travis-ci.com who are testing private Repositories on our Mac infrastructure. For travis-ci.org we provide a greater capacity, in terms of concurrent VMs, but have had to make some hard decisions on how and when to increase this capacity as the cost for helping the open source community is fairly high.

If you are a customer on travis-ci.com and you find your jobs are taking more than a couple of minutes to start, please contact our support team (support@travis-ci.com) and we can look into it.

As for people testing Repositories on travis-ci.org, we have recently added further capacity which has helped reduce our backlog significantly. We are looking into some further changes and improvements which we will provide more information on in a blog post soon.

Thanks for your patience, and please don't be afraid to email us at support@travis-ci.com if you would like us to look into your particular account.

Josh

[AnthonyOliveri]

Thank you for the clarifications Josh. The Mac builds have been much quicker over the past few days, so it looks like the infrastructure changes have helped quite a bit. I'm still getting some delays but nowhere near as bad as it had been over the past several weeks.

Is anyone else still experiencing big delays in build start times?