Closed LastStarDust closed 1 month ago
I don't have a lot of good news here.
For parallel builds, colcon currently relies on system load tracking in GNU Make to parallelize compilation within each concurrently building CMake package. Though CTest is able to run tests in parallel, it doesn't have the same load tracking parallelization feature that GNU Make does.
To work around this, you could pass --ctest-args -j <NUMBER_OF_WORKERS>
to your colcon test
invocations, but you should be careful. Many of the tests written for the ROS 2 core packages were not implemented with parallelization in mind and my fail. That doesn't mean you shouldn't write parallelizable tests in your packages, of course.
This story may improve a little bit when we get a GNU job server implemented for colcon-parallel-executor, at which point CTest will be able to borrow job slots from the executor when it want to run parallel tests, but we will probably need to set up a way to "opt-in" packages to parallel testing.
@cottsay Thank you for the quick reply.
--ctest-args -j <NUMBER_OF_WORKERS>
works as expected. Also I found out that export CTEST_PARALLEL_LEVEL=<NUMBER_OF_WORKERS>
has the same effect.
This issue has been mentioned on ROS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:
https://discourse.ros.org/t/how-to-run-multiple-tests-in-parallel-with-colcon-test/38675/2
I am currently engaged in a ROS2 project aimed at optimizing our testing processes by enabling concurrent execution of tests within a single package using
colcon test
.Initially, I attempted to utilize the
--parallel-workers
flag. However, this approach did not resolve the issue as intended. It facilitates parallel execution across multiple packages, but intra-package test execution remains sequential.Each test is implemented using the launch_testing framework and integrated into
colcon
via theadd_launch_test
macro within theCMakeLists.txt
file.Key specifics include:
colcon test
I am seeking guidance or practical examples that outline best practices for achieving concurrent test execution at the ROS2 package level.
In case what I am asking turned out to be not supported, I suggest to add it to the list of desired features to be implemented. Thank you in advance!