I did a Windows-only Try push investigating bug 874647, and I noticed that our xpcshell tests seem to be substantially faster on WinXP than on Win7 or Win8. On my Try push the WinXP opt xpcshell run took 27 minutes, Win7 opt took 54 minutes, and Win8 opt took 64 minutes: https://tbpl.mozilla.org/?tree=Try&rev=952274c52b4c These are all running on the new IX slaves, so they should be on equivalent hardware.

Actually this is probably just a dupe of our old bug 617503 that we never found any root cause for. :-(

(Although it shows up on the new IX hardware, which is an interesting data point.)

Is it possible that we haven't disabled the search indexing service on win7/win8 slave configuration?

Are we using FAT drives for win7/win8?

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg [:bsmedberg] from comment #3) > Is it possible that we haven't disabled the search indexing service on > win7/win8 slave configuration? I'm not sure off the top of my head, cc'ing a couple of people that might know. If they don't I'll try to look into this tomorrow.

We also might want to check ipv6 networking, we fixed something like this before - http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/xpcshell/head.js#68 maybe this regressed somehow.

Maybe Windows Defender? It's enabled by default on Vista+. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Defender

(In reply to Jim Mathies [:jimm] from comment #6) > We also might want to check ipv6 networking, we fixed something like this > before - > > http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/xpcshell/head.js#68 > > maybe this regressed somehow. Rather we should add tests for IPv6. IPv6 networking is sometimes broken silently because of lacking the tests.

XP: * Indexing is off ("Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" is checked, Indexing Service is disabled) * Disk is NTFS * IPv6 is disabled * Windows Defender is not installed Windows 7: * Indexing is off ("Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" is checked, but the Windows Search service is off) * Disk is NTFS * IPv6 is enabled * Windows Defender is on. Windows 8: * Indexing is off ("Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" is checked, but the Windows Search service is off) * Disk is NTFS * IPv6 is enabled * Windows Defender is on I filed bug 889976 to get it disabled.

Unrelated but when did we switch to ntfs? (That's great!) I think we have some xpcshell tests specific to ntfs features we can enable now.

We've been using NTFS for as long as I can remember! Maybe since 2008 or 2009?

We used to use FAT32 specifically because it was significantly faster than NTFS, at least if you have ACL-checking turned on. I still keep my build partitions on FAT32 for that reason.

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg [:bsmedberg] from comment #12) > We used to use FAT32 specifically because it was significantly faster than > NTFS, at least if you have ACL-checking turned on. I still keep my build > partitions on FAT32 for that reason. I'm not sure what happened to this. Not sure if it was a conscious choice or not. I'm not sure this makes as much of a difference on test machines, though. I just looked and the build machine drives are NTFS too =\.

Windows Defender is disabled now (per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=889976#c2)

Is ipv6 a requirement for the tester machines or should I disable it as well ?

Per comment 6 we don't currently need ipv6 networking.

I miss read that comment. I will get it turned off.

So did anything improve here?

I don't have a good way to say for sure, but poking around the buildcharts shows: http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/gofaster/buildchart.html#/builds/5ea208e46b01405ea3ad68483a7b274d xpcshell on XP taking 25 minutes xpcshell on Win7 taking 54 minutes xpcshell on Win8 taking 64 minutes. ...which is just about identical to what I said in comment 0. :-(