If you don’t care about Talos performance results, or Talos hardware, stop reading now! If you do care, this is the last in this series of posts.

Soon after my last post, we started running the new 2.26GHz minis, concurrently with the older 1.83GHz minis. Every build for several weeks now was performance tested on *both* sets of Talos machines, on all OS, and the graphs plotted on graphserver. Test results have been faster (obviously) and machines significantly more reliable (because of newer OS levels) but we’ve also noticed that overall test setup time is a bit longer, which we suspect is because these Talos machines are in 650castro, whereas the builds are on ftp.m.o. Its survivable, and we’re working on ways to improve it, but still worth noting. Most importantly, though, the two sets of machines track performance changes in Firefox in the same way.

Last week, we had enough rock solid concurrent data from both sets of machines to feel safe disconnecting the older rev2 minis. Out of (mild?) paranoia, we left them powered on, and ready to throw back into production at a moments notice, just in case we’d missed something weird with the new rev3 minis. And we patiently waited a week just in case…

Yesterday, we began powering down and recycling the old minis. The “talos-rev2-*” machines are no more.

At major milestones like this, its easy to get nostalgic – those machines carried us through a lot of major events. Talos changed from dedicated-slaves-per-branch to pool-of-slaves… Talos on TryServer… a whole collection of new Talos test suites… and of course the FF3.0, FF3.5, FF3.6 releases are the big events that spring to my pre-caffeinated mind. We thank them for all they’ve done for us and recycle them as part of the next big step for Talos and also for unittests – bug#545568 and bug#548768. All exciting stuff!!