Intermittent failure in parallel/test-fs-watchfile on AIX

[mhdawson]

• Version: master
• Platform: AIX
• Subsystem: fs

I think I've seen this fail a few times recently:

https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-test-commit-aix/6276/

not ok 433 parallel/test-fs-watchfile
  ---
  duration_ms: 60.193
  severity: fail
  stack: |-
    timeout
  ...

[mhdawson]

Another instance https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-test-commit-aix/6280/nodes=aix61-ppc64/console

[mhdawson]

Looks like there was a recent change to the test: 3b12a8d

FYI - @Trott

[Trott]

Ack. Looking at it right now.

[Trott]

Replication on master using tools/test.py -j 64 --repeat 128 test/parallel/test-fs-watchfile.js: https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-stress-single-test/1249/nodes=aix61-ppc64/console

So, still flaky under load. Will try to fix in place, but ultimately moving to sequential might help.

[refack]

From the logs it seems like something "snaps", 50-60 iterations work, then it just stops.
Maybe try more file names, or unlinking the file and rewriting it.

[Trott]

I'm able to get it up to over 100 iterations if I switch to a large enough timer that calls itself. I tried using a backoff algorithm but that didn't seem to help much. I wonder if what's really going on is that at some point, the operating system stops handing out working watchers.

I think the solution is to move it to sequential where it's not competing with other resources, at least for now. fs.watch() is quirky so there's no shame in that.

[Trott]

Removed the interval and put the test in sequential. Let's stress test it on AIX and macOS and see what happens.

AIX: https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-stress-single-test/nodes=aix61-ppc64/1258/console

macOS: https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-stress-single-test/1260/nodes=osx1010/console

EDIT: Typo'ed on the path names. Will try again...

[Trott]

Hopefully this time with the right parameters entered:

AIX: https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-stress-single-test/1261/nodes=aix61-ppc64/console
macOS: https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-stress-single-test/1262/nodes=osx1010/console