Docs.rs build prioritization

tools and infrastructure
16

OK, I looked at the documentation for docs.rs, and it looks like each crate is built within its own docker image. So this actually gives us a really simple procedure for dealing with the issue that allows us to reweight the relative performance of each build on the fly:

  1. On start up, use docker update -c to set the CPU share to 8. (see this article for an explanation of the CPU share option).
  2. For every 15 minutes of runtime of a given container, decrease the container's CPU share by 1, to a minimum of 1.
  3. There is no step 3.

Basically, this is kind of like using renice, but on the container as a whole, which means that resources are idle only if there's no work to do.