Site Overlay

Firefox Automation report – week 47/48 2014

In this post you can find an overview about the work happened in the Firefox Automation team during week 47 and 48.

Highlights

Most of the work during those two weeks made by myself were related to get [Jenkins](http://jenkins-ci.org/ upgraded on our Mozmill CI systems to the most recent LTS version 1.580.1. This was a somewhat critical task given the huge number of issue as mentioned in my last Firefox Automation report. On November 17th we were finally able to get all the code changes landed on our production machine after testing it for a couple of days on staging.

The upgrade was not that easy given that lots of code had to be touched, and the new LTS release still showed some weird behavior when connecting slave nodes via JLNP. As result we had to stop using this connection method in favor of the plain java command. This change was actually not that bad because it’s better to automate and doesn’t bring up the connection warning dialog.

Surprisingly the huge HTTP session usage as reported by the Monitoring plugin was a problem introduced by this plugin itself. So a simple upgrade to the latest plugin version solved this problem, and we will no longer get an additional HTTP connection whenever a slave node connects and which never was released. Once we had a total freeze of the machine because of that.

Another helpful improvement in Jenkins was the fix for a JUnit plugin bug, which caused concurrent builds to hang, until the former build in the queue has been finished. This added a large pile of waiting time to our Mozmill test jobs, which was very annoying for QA’s release testing work – especially for the update tests. Since this upgrade the problem is gone and we can process builds a lot faster.

Beside the upgrade work, I also noticed that one of the Jenkins plugins in use, it’s actually the XShell plugin, failed to correctly kill the running application on the slave machine in case of an job is getting aborted. The result of that is that following tests will fail on that machine until the not killed job has been finished. I filed a Jenkins bug and did a temporary backout of the offending change in that plugin.

Individual Updates

For more granular updates of each individual team member please visit our weekly team etherpad for week 47 and week 48.

Meeting Details

If you are interested in further details and discussions you might also want to have a look at the meeting agenda, the video recording, and notes from the Firefox Automation meetings of week 47 and week 48.

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.

Close