Re: meson: Adjust test timeout for Valgrind builds

Hi,

On 2026-04-03 14:53:15 +0000, Bertrand Drouvot wrote:
> When building with -DUSE_VALGRIND, tests run significantly slower due
> to Valgrind's instrumentation overhead, causing the default 1000s test's timeout
> to be exceeded. Example when running the regress test suite:
>
> "
> $ meson test -C build -q --print-errorlogs --setup running --suite regress-running
> regress-running - postgresql:regress-running/regress time out (After 1000 seconds)
>
> Summary of Failures:
>
> 1/1 regress-running - postgresql:regress-running/regress TIMEOUT 1000.01s
>
> Ok: 0
> Fail: 0
> Timeout: 1
> "
>
> PFA a patch that detects Valgrind builds using a compiler check, which correctly
> handles USE_VALGRIND being passed via -Dc_args, CPPFLAGS or CFLAGS and increases
> the test timeout to 10000s in that case.
>
> I don't have a strong opinion on the new value. In practice, the regress
> suite runs in about 30 seconds without Valgrind and in about 46 minutes with
> Valgrind on my setup. Note that the timeout is per test, not for the entire
> suite so that 10000s looks large enough (I tested to run the entire suite with
> the patch and it did not produce any timeout).
>
> Another option could be to disable the timeout on a Valgrind build (set timeout
> to 0) but then a test could block forever.
>
> Note that there are no changes needed for autoconf as it does not set a timeout
> for the tests.

The usual way to deal with that is to pass --timeout-multiplier=100 or
something like that to meson test.

Greetings,

Andres