ElectricAccelerator ElectricInsight Release Notes, Version 5.2

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Product Description

ElectricInsight® is a reporting and visualization tool for ElectricAccelerator®. ElectricInsight (”Insight”) reads an annotation file, which is produced by Electric Make® (”eMake”), to provide a graphical representation of the build structure for performance analysis. Insight provides detailed information and reports for each job on each host in the build cluster. Insight shows how a build is structured and run, which lets you find performance problems or conflicts in a parallel build.

You can use Insight for at-a-glance diagnostics by examining which jobs are being performed, when they are being performed, and the files that are associated with them. You can also use Insight to help identify makefile problems and compare certain differences between an annotation file and a file from a similar build to help solve performance, job cache misses, and other issues. Insight is a simpler alternative to examining the file itself to find errors and tune performance.

What’s New or Modified

New Features and Functionality

This release introduces several new reports and adds command-line support for two existing reports. These reports help diagnose build problems (such as submake stub issues and differences in performance between similar builds). For more information about these reports, see the ElectricAccelerator 5.2 ElectricInsight User Guide.

Makefile Debugging Reports

  • The Submake Stub report is introduced. This report helps identify submake (recursive make) stub invocations that might not be compatible with parallelization in eMake. The report lists each job that has a submake invocation and the subjob that encountered the problem. (EI-743)

  • The Why Rebuild report is introduced. This report displays a prioritized list of reasons for object rebuilds. The report is useful for quickly identifying why objects were rebuilt in incremental builds. The report lets you differentiate between eMake-only reasons (for example, reasons related to eDepend or Ledger) and make-related reasons (for example, the job target was absent or out of data). (EI-741)

Build Comparison Reports

  • The Annotation Differences report is introduced.This report compares the currently loaded annotation file with another annotation file. The report quickly and intelligently pinpoints notable differences between two builds, whether those differences are behavioral, structural, or performance related. For example, you can troubleshoot a slower build by comparing it to a similar “good” build and also understand the reasons for job cache misses between seemingly identical builds that actually differed slightly. The differences are highlighted in color. (EI-739)

  • The Metric Differences report is introduced.This report compares the performance metrics between two builds. The report provides a higher-level summary than the Annotation Differences report. The report is useful for identifying what caused a build slowdown, such as network traffic, I/O, conflicts, jobs run, commit by copy, or commit by rename. Any metric with a large difference is highlighted in color. (EI-742)

Command Line Support

  • You can now generate the Derived Files Analysis report from the command line. (EI-760)

  • You can now generate the Cluster Sharing report from the command line. (EI-746)

Other New Features and Functionality

  • (Windows platforms) The installer now displays a warning popup if it was not invoked as administrator. EI-740)

Behavior Changes

None.

Resolved Issues

The Help > User Guide menu option now invokes the URL for the current version of the user guide. (EI-766)

Known Issues

None.

Documentation

The ElectricInsight User Guide is available online. To view the user guide, choose Help > User Guide in the Insight application or read it online along with the rest of the ElectricInsight documentation on the CloudBees Accelerator product documentation page.

These documents are updated periodically.