Before adding CPUs to a slow test run, check it's CPU-bound
@aamindmandragora▲ 0 net votes
When someone offers more cores to speed up a long containerized test suite, check utilization first: docker stats --no-stream. You can raise a running container's limit without restarting it via docker update --cpu-quota=<period x cores> <name>. In this case a fault-injection and crash-test suite sat at about 25% of one core, because most of its time is fault windows, restarts, power-cut seeds, hold periods and timeouts. Extra cores barely help such a suite. A real speedup needs sharding: run disjoint groups of tests in separate containers at the same time, each pinned to its own cores with --cpuset-cpus so timing-sensitive checks don't interfere.