Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Facebook lifts the veil on its mobile machine testing lab

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Earlier this week, Facebook gave a small group of reporters a tour of its Prineville, OR data center. In the method, the organization also showed off its mobile machine lab for testing on actual physical equipment new iOS and Android variations of the Facebook application, Messenger and Instagram.


device_testing_lab_facebookThe mobile machine lab currently occupies sixty racks in the data heart. Each rack holds 32 telephones, for a total of pretty much two,000 equipment, but, as Facebook’s Antoine Reversat told us, the prepare is to bring this quantity to sixty four equipment for each rack.


Each rack characteristics its have Wi-Fi signal and is also an EMI enclosure to make absolutely sure that neighboring racks can’t choose up the Wi-Fi alerts from its neighbors.


Each individual time an engineer makes alterations to a single of Facebook’s most important mobile apps, that new variation of the application is immediately tested on these equipment to make certain that there are no crashes or overall performance concerns.


The offered equipment run from primary Android Galaxy telephones to the most up-to-date iPhones. As Reversat pointed out, these equipment also run a quantity of distinctive variations of their respective working units. For Android, that’s all the most up-to-date variations from KitKat on, and for iOS, that’s iOS seven to 9 (I think the staff is also testing iOS ten presently, as perfectly).


To make certain that tests are comparable, the telephones all reboot soon after just about every exam.


All of the telephones also want to be linked to a Personal computer or Mac in purchase to get the most up-to-date code. For the reason that of this, there are PCs and Mac Mini’s beneath just about every rack. Facebook makes use of eight Mac Minis for each rack for iOS testing (simply because each a single can only speak to 4 iPhones) or 4 OCP Leopard servers for testing Android equipment.


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But why decide for on-machine testing when there are plenty of simulators that would be a great deal easier to cope with? The Facebook groups argues that whilst simulators are excellent at figuring out why apps may possibly not be doing the job appropriate, they aren’t fantastic for overall performance testing. “For illustration, we wouldn’t be equipped to keep track of down a 1 p.c overall performance regression in a simulator,” Reversat claims in today’s official announcement. “So we opted for on-machine testing.”


Though Facebook didn’t say all that a great deal about how it pushes updates to the telephones apart from that it makes use of Chef, Reversat pointed out that the device lab grew out of the company’s work on CT-Scan, a overall performance-monitoring provider the organization initially talked about previous yr. Early on, engineers would exam apps on a single machine, but provided how numerous telephones and tablets there are on the marketplace nowadays, that basically didn’t scale and a small staff within just Facebook’s Production Engineering business set off to create these racks.





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The earliest variations of these racks ended up rather primary and didn’t actually work perfectly (mostly simply because they ended up created from metal and too a great deal metal means the Wi-Fi signal basically didn’t work any more). The staff also experimented with making a wall with 240 equipment, but that took up too a great deal room.


The most up-to-date variation of the mobile machine rack the organization is at present applying in Prineville also characteristics a digicam to keep track of what’s going on on the equipment, nevertheless it looks the staff hasn’t rather activated this element but.


The staff is now doing the job on supporting up to sixty four equipment for each rack and making the method of pushing new code to the equipment a lot more effective. It"s possible even a lot more importantly, nevertheless, the staff also strategies to open up-resource the layout of the racks and the Chef recipes that generate the telephones.


Facebook, of study course, is not on your own in managing a lab like this. If you want to exam your have apps, for illustration, you can decide for managing them on providers from the likes of Xamarin (now owned by Microsoft), Amazon and Google (for Android apps).


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Facebook lifts the veil on its mobile machine testing lab
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