Wellington test team vs Activities - 2008-09-13

[Martin Langhoff]

My notes

Today we did a lot more activity testing, while keeping an eye out for
OOM behaviour. On several machines we captured the output of ps_mem.py
in a bg process. It quickly got boring as we didn't see any mem usage
spikes.

General
- We were distributing the activities on ext3 usb sticks -- this does
not work. Attached logs to #8099
- Machines have /home/pilgrim and/or /home/cscott directories...?
Upgrade methods mixed (NAND, olpc-update) so I'm uncertain of the
source of the problem...
- Memory pressure/OOM killer: we didn't see the OOM killer in action.
Firefox with several tabs open did get machines unusable due to memory
pressure and killall -9 firefox failed to kill it. At that point
ps_mem.py reported ff taking ~80MB - was ok as the single activity
open, but could not coexist with another heavy activity such as
Physics. At such times vmstat reported 0 buffers, 3M free, and
ps_mym.py ~189MB used in total.

Story Builder
- Gorgeous activity, and well thought out lesson plans. Wish all
activities had this.
- Very slow - almost unusable
- Very high cpu usage on idle. Other activities from the same set
don't suffer this problem.

Map
- Hit #8318 which causes it to fail to start. yum install hulahop
didn't see the new hulahop (reported as fixed by Scott) - probably in
a different repo, so could not confirm the fix.

Cartoon Builder
- Very cool, also excellent lesson plans
- The lesson plans in "Spanish" look remarkably similar to the English
ones :-) #8459
- On close, got 'Keep error' #8460

OurStories
- Fails to start - #8461 - from what I can see, suspect that the
original authors have done something really nice but have failed to
package the .xo properly...
- Seems to be a really compelling concept from the wikipage...

Physics
- Too addictive - lost a ton of time playing with it.
- Does not close - #8462
- High cpu usage when not in focus #8463

Firefox
- Consumes a lot of memory
- Is not killable when under memory pressure (perhaps it just takes
very long to be killed?)





-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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