improve testing precompilation

[laurentheirendt]

This idea could potentially be improved: #303

We could try to warmup/precompile the solvers inside the docker container

[exaexa]

https://julialang.github.io/PackageCompiler.jl/dev/sysimages/

[exaexa]

Status after much testing:

• solvers can't be precompiled because Julia can't precompile mixed-package (MOI + JuMP + solver) stuff now
• sysImages are a solution but not for testing (you spend more time creating the sysImage than precompiling in the test)
• the "careful precompilation on all workers" already helped a bit

It would make sense to do sysImages in containers, esp for HPC deployment, so I'm moving that idea to #68

[laurentheirendt]

the

[laurentheirendt]

the containers that we generate from the package are actually for the package and not the testing of it. There must be a way that we can pre-compile in the docker images for testing 😄

[exaexa]

But you are technically never testing 2 same versions of COBREXA, so the precompiled material is not going to get re-used anyway right?

[laurentheirendt]

as far as I understand, COBREXA is not recompiled with all other packages together, or is it?

[exaexa]

not sure.

thinking about it, if we make a julia sysImage with precompiled JuMP + some solver(s), which is 90% of the compilation time anyway, we pretty much solve the problem. Does that sound OK?

[laurentheirendt]

that sounds promising 👍🏼

[exaexa]

Tests today:

• without PackageCompiler the tests run in ~3:40
• with a prepared environment I was able to shrink it to ~2:30
  Precompilation of actual cobrexa is still pretty slow though, making up around 40 seconds there, but we can't do much with that as the code is different at each test.

Making the PackageCompiler image takes around 4 minutes.

[exaexa]

not really feasible anymore; there's julia cache (works pretty well) and most of the functionality is getting moved off the package, which will make fixing this basically unnecessary. Closing.