clearcase dynamic view build taking long time

Question

We are experiencing drastic increase in the build time while building code in clearcase vob whose master is in other location without winkins. Previously several months ago it used to build in 3hours but now it is taking 13 hours. We now tried to build the code by editing config-spec to the previous date though it is taking very long to build.

suspecting hardware configuration changes in the machine. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Looks in the logs for messages (as in this thread) where the clearmake process trying to contact user-views (message "This view will not be contacted for next 60 minutes…")

As described in "ClearCase Build Concepts", check if your build views are isolated or shared: one mode or the other could reveal to be faster.

Answer 2

I have seen this scenario before at client sites where something pathological has occurred with the network.

Checking logs is a great place to start. Another test would be to run traceroute and ping between the build machine and the view and vob servers. If a name servers stops responding it will take a few seconds before it times out. Earlier versions of ClearCase would not cache the IP address and name resolution would occur many times per request. The incremental delay of timing out and failing over to another name server would cause builds to increase 5x to 10x in duration.

In a nutshell, I would strongly suspect the network first.