bug#70663: nss@3.99 is really hard to build

[Christina O'Donnell <cdo@mutix.org>]

Hi,

On 01/05/2024 18:14, Christopher Baines wrote:
> Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>> Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> writes:
>>
>>> nss@3.99 is really hard to build, it's so hard and so important that
>>> data.guix.gnu.org is still after two days trying to process [1]. I say
>>> so important because you have to build nss@3.99 to compute the channel
>>> instance derivations for Guix.
>> I agree that the nss test suite takes a ridiculous amount of time to run
>> (multiple hours on a fast machine IIRC).  Are we missing a '--fast' test
>> flag or something to make it run in a more reasonable amount of time?
> I did read some of the all.sh script used for the tests and there is
> some environment variables you can set here:
>
>    https://github.com/nss-dev/nss/blob/master/tests/all.sh#L70-L82
>
> It seems like there are 4 "cycles", maybe we could just run the standard
> cycle or at least check how long they each take.

On my machine building natively on x86_64 I was getting approximately 63 
mins for a full test and 20 mins for just the 'standard' 'cycle'. My 
vote would be to just run 'standard' since that runs all of the tests once.

I can profile individual tests if needed to see if there's any that are 
particularly worth culling, but just the above change is an easy win 
without sacrificing too much test coverage.

Kind regards,

Christina