Gen EDGE

  • 1.  ToolSet Build speed on VM install of CA Gen 8.5

    Posted Jul 31, 2018 05:32 AM

    Is any one out there experiencing issues with a VM install of the toolset for CA 8.5.

     

    Everything works fine except the Generation which is roughly half the speed of an equivalent desktop setup.

     

    I have added more CPU sockets and more cores and get the same speed out build.

     

    we are using Vshphere 6.x so any help will be appreciated.



  • 2.  Re: ToolSet Build speed on VM install of CA Gen 8.5

    Posted Jul 31, 2018 06:52 AM

    I've seen the same thing on both Hyper-V and VMWare Workstation Player.  I think it's just fundamentally not a VM friendly workload.

    Disabling in-VM antivirus, putting the VM on an SSD, adding more memory, and ensuring antivirus doesn't scan the VMDK/VHDX's on the host helps a little bit, but it doesn't claw back the difference.

    I'd love to know a fix for this as well - it would make life less painful.



  • 3.  Re: ToolSet Build speed on VM install of CA Gen 8.5

    Posted Jul 31, 2018 07:31 AM

    Thanks StrattonD, tried all of that, went daft.

     

    Removed antivirus, single socket, 50 core 10gb, I was still on an average line per second of about 4.5k local box is about 8k+

     

    Anyone tried CA8.6, I am assuming that it will be the same as I think form memory the generation code base is still the same as 8.5



  • 4.  Re: ToolSet Build speed on VM install of CA Gen 8.5

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jul 31, 2018 07:52 PM

    Hi Mike/Dan,

    It was my understanding that the Gen generators have always been single-threaded which I just confirmed with Engineering is correct. So that explains why adding more cpu cores did not help.

    Could the performance difference therefore be explained by relative performance of a single core on the VM versus the Desktop?

     

    Regards,

     

    Lynn

    P.S. I also converted to discussion for any other user experience inputs on this topic.



  • 5.  Re: ToolSet Build speed on VM install of CA Gen 8.5

    Posted Aug 01, 2018 07:03 AM

    Hi Mike

    Have you tried using Oracle's Virtual Box instead as the VM platform? 

    I ran a test on one of our Virtual Box VM machines, on my laptop (so read as a resource starved VM instance), and achieved 10-15K lines per second in Gen 8.6 Generation, I can't imagine Gen 8.5 would be much different in generation speed...

    Kevin



  • 6.  Re: ToolSet Build speed on VM install of CA Gen 8.5

    Posted Aug 02, 2018 03:24 AM

    Kev,

     

    Thanks for the reply, only issue is that we cannot choose the corporate solution for the VM platform. So VSphere6.x it is.

     

    Reviewing other Dev users in our organisation it seems the average output is 6k lines per sec on the base machines, I seem to have set mine up to be the best timed. So will explore a bit further.

     

    Thanks for the advice.

     

    Mike



  • 7.  Re: ToolSet Build speed on VM install of CA Gen 8.5

    Posted Aug 02, 2018 11:40 AM

    OK further update, got some traction by starting the toolset with the affinity of 1 core, this then pushed the VM lines per second upto 7-8k so 2k increase.

     

    This starts the Build tool launced from the toolset in 1 cpu affinity, does anyone know the start bat for the build tool when pushed from the toolset after generation ? I could look at altering that scripts to reset the affinity on start.

     

    Mike



  • 8.  Re: ToolSet Build speed on VM install of CA Gen 8.5

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Aug 05, 2018 05:55 PM

    Hi Mike,

    I checked with Engineering. They confirmed that like a manual start of the Build Tool which uses BLDTOOL.BAT that same file is used when the Toolset auto starts the Build Tool for an install request.

     

    Regards,

     

    Lynn



  • 9.  Re: ToolSet Build speed on VM install of CA Gen 8.5

    Posted Aug 24, 2018 02:06 AM

    yes, the builds for gen are single streamed. code generation though can be multi-threaded if you utilise GuardIEn for builds and set the relevant parameter(s). (so a server side build and not client side)

    We found that on a 2.2GHz or lower VM that builds were real slow. Going to 3GHz+ and having storage as SSD or even making sure windows indexing is on for the relevant folder, does help greatly in build speed.

    Also depends on what you are generating ... are you building cobol, java or C#. You can tweak some of the compile parameters in the scr files but you will be still bound by the limitations of what your underlying hardware is capable of.