Re: Heads Up: cirrus-ci is shutting down June 1st

Hi Nazir/Andres,

On Tue, Jun 2, 2026 at 12:13 PM Jakub Wartak
<jakub(dot)wartak(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Hi Andres/Nazir,
>
[..]
> Continuing on previous story...:
> Windows was still @ 31mins, and whatever I've tried it is was not helping it
> (but I cannot measure inside GHA Runner what was happening, so those were blind
> shots with fstweaks, etc). One important thing, altough I failed altering
> CacheIsPowerProtected (avoid flushing the write cache) as it seems impossible
> for me to do so on D:\ (as paging file is there and and altering it also
> requires reboot), at least we know stuff is way slower than it could be on
> those runners:
>
> "Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageAdvancedProperty" reported:
>
> FriendlyName SerialNumber IsPowerProtected IsDeviceCacheEnabled
> ------------ ------------ ---------------- --------------------
> Msft Virtual Disk False False
> Msft Virtual Disk False False
>
> Perhaps there's way to use some custom image/templ with different settings,
> especially for D:\, after all it's just volatile stuff. Thoughts? (not that I
> care that much for Win, but waiting half hour for it finish every time is
> not going to be nice...)
>
[..]

OK, so to close the loop: does no no-write-flushing (and ReFS) can help us here?
I've made it work, but the possible configuration is just slower (just
"Test run"
step) by +2mins (26vs28 mins) :(

Longer:
* This is windows 2022 server, so ReFS (MS next-gen fs) is available.
Technically
robocopy should do CoW (for our initdb clones out there).
* D:\ cannot cannot be reformatted from NTFS as ReFS mainly due to
active pagefile
and github agent places files there too.
* But (!) one can make loop-image on D:\ with ReFS (sic!)
* And disable write-cache-flushing with some hacks (usually used with
RAID cards with
BBU)

And I've bumped TEST_JOBS 4->8 (even with 4 VCPUs), because my local
runs showed in
taskmgr that after quite some time we have ended up using just ~40%
CPU (also with
4 VCPUs) while not doing I/O (this is somehow contrary to what Andres
was stating
earlier). I cannot find way to add observability of CPU usage on GHA runner, so
just gonna leave it as that (but before anybody wishes to add more CPU it would
actually help if such workload on GHA is really on CPU or I/O there).

So it appears that without going into the dragon's den (I mean deeply
analyzing our
tests, especially subscription and recovery), we won't gain much in such setup.

Patch attached if anybody wants to experiment more.

-J.