[Insight-developers] Not Really Parallel Build

[Bill Hoffman]

Kevin H. Hobbs wrote:
> On 11/12/2009 07:40 AM, Gaëtan Lehmann wrote:
>>
>> Your host was loaded by something else?
> 
> No, I was just logged in over ssh.
> 
>> The execution time should decrease with the number of threads - that's
>> not always the case here.
>>
>> I found firefox (with ~ 20 tabs) to be quite bad for the performance for
>> example!
>>
> 
> Firefox is a bit of a memory hog, but it's nothing compared to the
> memory used when ITK is tested with :
> 
> ITK_COMPUTER_MEMORY_SIZE:STRING=12
> 
> I just re-ran some of the parallel tests now that I'm in the lab and am
> better able to monitor what's going on.
> 
> When CTest hit the IO tests in parallel the system used all 12 gigabytes
> of memory and started swapping.
> 
> There were several IO tests running at once all of which were requiring
> several gigabytes of memory.
> 
> Is there some way to make the large memory IO tests run sequentially
> during parallel testing?
> 
> If not, then I'll abandon parallel testing since large image processing
> is important to my work and speeding up testing is not very important to me.
> 
Yes, we can set the RUN_SERIAL property on those tests in the cmake files.

  RUN_SERIAL: If set to true, this test will not run in parallel with
       any other tests. This should be used in conjunction with
       the ctest_test PARALLEL_LEVEL option.


-Bill