5d7cf885

By: Tom Sydney Kerckhove <syd@cs-syd.eu>

Make controls sparser and cheaper to run

A control is a no-op mutation that is expected to survive, so unlike a real
mutation its child cannot stop at the test that kills it: it runs every
covering test it is given, to the end. That makes the cheapest kind of
mutation to produce the most expensive kind to run, and on a large project
the controls of a run came to well over a third of its mutation phase while
being a fraction of its mutations.

What a control is for is noticing a suite that cannot be relied on, which the
number of controls answers rather than the number of tests each one runs. So
there is now one every hundred mutations rather than every twelve, and each is
checked against its cheapest ten covering tests rather than all of them. The
cap lives in the coverage phase so that the record says what the child will
run and the budget is derived from it.

Every module still gets a control at its first mutation site, which it did not
need before: at one per twelve mutations every module of any size got one
anyway, and at one per hundred a project of small modules would get none. That
also keeps this repository's own example, whose modules are far smaller than
that, exercising controls at all.
GitHub

Total

16m12s

Created Started Finished

Time to Start Worker time Duration Time to finish Idle
Config 13m31s 1s 1s 13m32s 13m31s
Eval 27m02s 2m40s 2m41s 29m43s 15m10s
Build - - - - -
Suite 13m31s 2m42s 16m12s 29m43s 28m42s

Timeline

Config Eval Failed Retried Compressed gap
0s27m20s27m40s28m28m20s28m40s29m29m20s29m40s