Using pypi-mirror with devtest

A full run of TripleO's devtest takes a long time - around an hour or more on my i7/16GB box even with a hot squid cache. Quite a bit of the time is spent building images, and there are a few ways to speed that up, some of which are easier than others.

In the past I've used the pip-cache and pypi-openstack image elements along with the aforementioned squid cache to decrease image build times, but there's been quite a bit of discussion lately around using pypi-mirror and the pypi element. These aren't especially new elements, but they do require some work up front so I had never tried them myself.

This week I decided to change that. I built a pypi-mirror manually on my existing proxy VM by following the steps in the pypi-mirror script, but I don't particularly recommend that method because I messed up some steps and in the end it probably took longer than just building and deploying a new image would have. Either way, my local pypi mirror is now up and running, and this morning I was able to complete a full devtest run to see how much faster it was. I had to set the following env vars:

# These two are documented in the pypi element
export PYPI_MIRROR_URL=http://roxy/pypi/Fedora-20
export PYPI_MIRROR_URL_1=http://roxy/pypi/
# I had to set this one because my pypi-mirror wheels were built for 64-bit, so if I wanted to use them I had to make sure the archs matched. Update: I just did a 32-bit run against the local mirror without using wheels and most of the speed benefit went away, so I don't recommend doing that.
export NODE_ARCH="amd64"
export DIB_COMMON_ELEMENTS="stackuser pip-cache pypi"


Then I ran devtest.sh --trash-my-machine and compared the results to a previous run. Here are the contents of devtest_perf.log (which you can find in your TRIPLEO_ROOT directory after a successful run) before and after setting up the mirror:

[2014-03-24 20:27:31] Run comment : No Comment
[2014-03-24 20:27:31] Total runtime: 3206 s
[2014-03-24 20:27:31] ramdisk : 165 s
[2014-03-24 20:27:31] seed : 700 s
[2014-03-24 20:27:31] undercloud : 790 s
[2014-03-24 20:27:31] overcloud : 1539 s
[2014-03-24 20:27:31] DIB_COMMON_ELEMENTS=stackuser pip-cache pypi-openstack use-ephemeral
[2014-03-27 15:37:02] Run comment : No Comment
[2014-03-27 15:37:02] Total runtime: 2675 s
[2014-03-27 15:37:02] ramdisk : 124 s
[2014-03-27 15:37:02] seed : 539 s
[2014-03-27 15:37:02] undercloud : 639 s
[2014-03-27 15:37:02] overcloud : 1320 s
[2014-03-27 15:37:02] DIB_COMMON_ELEMENTS=stackuser pip-cache pypi use-ephemeral


Around 9 minutes less for the full run, and that's comparing to a hot cache. If you were running with a cold/no cache I expect the difference would be much larger. I left the pip-cache element since the drawbacks to that element don't matter to me, and I figured it couldn't hurt.

Now that I've got my mirror set up and added the appropriate env vars to my tripleo rc file, I shouldn't have to do much to take advantage of this added speed, which should be a big win for my future development. If I can find a way to avoid hitting an external mirror for package installs (I don't think running a full distro mirror locally is an option, but we'll see), I might be able to keep my image installs entirely on my local gigabit network. Stay tuned. :-)