Topic on Extension talk:Scribunto

On having a lot of random bugs during testing

1
Jeblad (talkcontribs)

This extension have a nasty habit of throwing really weird errors during unit tests in Vagrant. I've been asking several people about the real root cause for this, but the explanation goes from slightly wrong to complete whimsical. When it is present it only affects the sandboxed environment, so a known fix is to use the standalone environment. That has a real impact in production, but for testing it works. (Actually, if you turn off one of the environments the tests goes at least twice as fast. Pretty obvious as it runs the tests in both environments, and the setup consumes most (or a lot) of the time spent in a test, thus turning one of the two test sets off will make the tests run faster.)

The fun thing is; I've experienced the problems on both Ubuntu and Win10, on two different machines. My two different machines has in fact the same motherboard and nearly the same CPU from AMD.

Backtracking what I did when the bug (?) turned up and later when it disappeared, made me wonder if has something to do with the microcode for avoiding the Spectre vulnerability. It seems to have hit when Ubuntu included an update that had a reference to the micocode, and later it seems to have disappeared when there were another update also involving the microcode.

It is a rather weak correlation here, so whether it was the real root cause is unclear, but if you get a lot of really weird errors while running unit tests try to run a newer version of your OS. If that does not help, and you have enough server juice, use the standalone version.

For another discussion on the topic, see Luasandbox gives a sigsegv. Yes, it is weird.

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