QA » openQA Project » openQA Infrastructure

openqaworker1 has 256GiB of RAM and currently hosts 20 workers which use around ~2GiB of RAM for the VM (depending on the test) and let's say 1GiB for the worker code each.
That means only ~60GiB of RAM are "actively" used during test runs, the remaining ~200GiB might be used as caches or buffers.

By using the NVMe storage devices (1T + 380G) as swap, it would be possible to use a tmpfs on /var/lib/openqa to host the various isos and HDD images.
That way the kernel decides which data is written to disk (i.e. swap) at all, instead of flushing all data to a persistent filesystem regularly (triggered by QEMU). This might noticably increase test performance.

Possible advantages¶

• Less wear on the SSDs -> increase of lifetime
• Better performance of tests
• Could possible increase worker count further

Risks¶

• Some downtime required
• Might not work as intended, or at all, so the change might have to be rolled back
• The cache is no longer persistent, so it would have to download necessary assets after each day. That shouldn't be much of an issue, but might be noticable.