Building larger Java projects on a laptop with Maven can be frustrating and slow. Learn how you could slash down building times by building in the cloud instead.
Setup
As a founder of open-source Speedment Stream ORM, I usually build the project several times per day on my now somewhat old laptop (Macbook Pro, Mid 2015). The Speedment project consists of over 60 modules and the build process is managed by Maven. The project lives
here on Github.
I wanted to find out if I could save time by building the project in the cloud instead. In this short article, I will share my results. I have compared my laptop with Oracle Cloud, running the same build process.
I am using the following setup:
| Laptop | Oracle Cloud | |
| Java JDK | OracleJDK 1.8.0_191 | OracleJDK 1.8.0_201 |
| Maven Version | 3.6.0 | 3.5.4 |
| CPU Cores | 4 | 4 |
| CPU Type | 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 | 2.0 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum 8167M |
| RAM | 30G | 16G |
I should mention that we also have continuous integration servers that run in the cloud using Jenkins.
Laptop
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 | Pers-MBP:speedment pemi$ time mvn clean install...[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------[INFO] Total time: 07:46 min[INFO] Finished at: 2019-04-09T15:34:25+02:00[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------real 7m48.065suser 12m33.850ssys 0m50.476s |
Oracle Cloud
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 | [opc@instance-20190409-xxxx speedment]$ time mvn clean install...[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------[INFO] Total time: 03:41 min[INFO] Finished at: 2019-04-09T13:30:20Z[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------real 3m42.602suser 10m22.353ssys 0m32.967s |
Parallel Builds
Running parallel builds reduce building time:
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 | Pers-MBP:speedment pemi$ time mvn -T 4 clean installreal 4m47.629suser 14m24.607ssys 0m56.834s[opc@instance-20190409-xxxx speedment]$ time mvn -T 4 clean installreal 3m21.731suser 11m15.436ssys 0m34.000s |
Summary
The following graph shows a comparison for sequential Speedment Maven builds on my laptop vs. Oracle Cloud (lower is better):
The next graph shows a comparison for parallel builds (lower is better):
The conclusion is that sequential build time was reduced by over 50% when I used the cloud solution and the parallel build time was reduced by 30%.
If I re-build completely two times a day, this means I will save 2 hours per month. More importantly, I will get feedback faster so I could stay “in the development flow”.
As a final word, it should be noted that there are other complementary ways of reducing building times including selecting appropriate maven and JVM parameters, only build changed modules and running the build under GraalVM.
Resources
Speedment Open Source: https://github.com/speedment/speedment
Oracle Cloud: https://cloud.oracle.com/home
Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Per Minborg, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Java: How to Slash Down Building Times Using the Cloud Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
