Change travis clone depth to 3

[styfle]

Description

By default Travis CI clones the last 50 commits. Cloning less means faster checkout and clone times which results in slightly faster builds.

See the docs for more information.

Contributor

• no tests required for this PR.

Committer

In most cases, this should be a different person than the contributor.

• Draft GitHub release notes have been updated.
• CI is green (no forced merge required).
• Merge PR

[UziTech]

Does the git depth need to be more than 1?

[styfle]

@UziTech Yes, according to the docs:

if you use a depth of 1 and have a queue of jobs, Travis CI won’t build commits that are in the queue when you push a new commit.

[styfle]

I could change to 3 if you are thinking it should be lower?

[UziTech]

I was just thinking it should be as low as it can be. I don't know if there will be much of a difference in speed from 5 to 3

[styfle]

I have tried in a couple other repos and the speed difference is really small. It saves about 0.5 sec for each test from changing from depth 50 to 5.

[styfle]

I just changed from 5 to 3 so let's see if there is any measurable change.

[styfle]

Looks like the clone/checkout time went up for some reason.

It's hard to get good numbers because travis build times are widely different, even with zero changes to the config.

[styfle]

@UziTech Any other thoughts on this?

[UziTech]

So, if I'm understanding this right, travis clones multiple commits so it can checkout the commit it needs to run the tests on in case there was another commit after the one travis is testing?

I don't think we need travis to pass on anything other than the last few commits. Then again .5 seconds faster on a 2 minute task doesn't save much.

[styfle]

travis clones multiple commits so it can checkout the commit it needs to run the tests on in case there was another commit after the one travis is testing

I'm not entirely sure about that but that seems correct based on the warning that depth=1 will skip the queued builds and just build the latest commit.

@DanielRuf Can you answer this question?

[DanielRuf]

I have tried in a couple other repos and the speed difference is really small. It saves about 0.5 sec for each test from changing from depth 50 to 5.

It highly depends on the sizes of the diffs between those commits and how much data they load. In big projects like Magento 2 you often see better results than in smaller projects. Generally: YMMV

[DanielRuf]

So, if I'm understanding this right, travis clones multiple commits so it can checkout the commit it needs to run the tests on in case there was another commit after the one travis is testing?

No, in general these shallow clones are meant to do some testing with detached heads and testing between a range of commits (if needed). Keeping the value low ensures better clone / checkout times in many projects.

[DanielRuf]

All commits except the first (root) only contain diffs when you work with Git.

[DanielRuf]

I'm not entirely sure about that but that seems correct based on the warning that depth=1 will skip the queued builds and just build the latest commit.

If you set it to 1 it waits until the build on this commit is done to trigger a new build for this specific commit. This can introduce issues in some cases. Anyway, 5 should be sufficient if it brings any visible improvements.

This + cache / node_modules / composer cache can dramatically boost the performance of builds.

[DanielRuf]

Right, not much room for improvement here as it is a relatively small project (except you have big commits, then you do not want to clone the big one always for the next 50 commits).

[UziTech]

Travis CI clones repositories to a depth of 50 commits, which is only really useful if you are performing git operations.

Please note that if you use a depth of 1 and have a queue of jobs, Travis CI won’t build commits that are in the queue when you push a new commit.

@DanielRuf So travis uses the depth as how many jobs can be in the queue? I'm not understanding why we need more than 1. We aren't doing any git operations.

[UziTech]

according to travis-ci/travis-ci#8321 (comment) :

git.depth is used when we clone the repo to run the build. If the commit you are trying to build is not reachable within the given depth at the time the repository is cloned during the build, it will fail.

We could really use Auto Cancellation and set the depth to 1 since we should never need to build anything other than the latest commit.

[UziTech]

we may need to test out our minify step to make sure it still works

[DanielRuf]

@DanielRuf So travis uses the depth as how many jobs can be in the queue? I'm not understanding why we need more than 1. We aren't doing any git operations.

Not exactly. 1 would prevent multiple jobs with the same commit in them and would introduce some waiting time.5 is (still) enough. 1 can but does not have to produce any issues. Best practice is: do not use 1 but a greater value to allow builds for reused commits.

[DanielRuf]

we may need to test out our minify step to make sure it still works

Definitely.

[styfle]

@UziTech How can we test the minify step if it only runs on master? Merge this and see what happens?

[UziTech]

Ya pretty much. I think it should be fine.

[styfle]

@joshbruce @davisjam Any objections?