Introducing Talos Tp5

This morning, we started running Alice’s new Tp5 performance test suite in production.

From now until 30June2011, we will run the Tp4 suite and also the Tp5 suite on every checkin, on every branch. This will add ~15mins extra load per checkin, which adds up quickly when you consider the number of checkins we do daily at Mozilla. We *think* our infrastructure can handle this extra load just fine because of Armen’s super-detailed behind-the-scenes work pruning obsolete tests, consolidating tests suites, reassigning idle win64 slaves, disabling perma-orange tests…

If there are no problems detected by 30June, we’ll disable Tp4 across the board and only measure Tp5. Of course, if you see anything wrong with the Tp5 results, or you see any infrastructure load problems, please file a bug in mozilla.org/ReleaseEngineering and we’ll get right on it!

(For those who don’t know: Tp is a performance test suite that measures page load times on the top 100 pages of http://www.alexa.com/topsites. The list of the top pages changes over time, obviously, as people change to use different websites, so we refresh the pagesets periodically. Before Tp5, there was Tp4, Tp3…)