Tests are slow about zdaemon

[mgedmin]

I have an amazing patch that shortens the test runtime to 14s, but it breaks one fragile test (dont_hang_when_program_doesnt_start), BECAUSE THAT TEST IS RACY.

[mgedmin]

dont_hang_when_program_doesnt_start relies on one of two possible sequence of events:

• get_status() reports that daemon manager is not running
• ./zdaemon spawns the daemon manager
• get_status() reports that daemon manager is running but the managed process is not
• get_status() reports that daemon manager is not running

or

• get_status() reports that daemon manager is not running
• ./zdaemon spawns the daemon manager
• get_status() reports that daemon manager is not running until 10 seconds elapse

The test, however, sets up a situation where

1. ./zdaemon spawns the daemon manager
2. the daemon manager spawns the process
3. the process exits with an error message ("sleep: missing operand")
4. go to step 2 until backoff-limit is reached (2 seconds)

If the get_status() check hits the window between 2 and 3, the main wait loop will assume the process started correctly and will exit.

Um. I now see that I accidentally moved the time.sleep() inside an if where it should've stayed outside, which made the race easier to hit (and introduced a bug where the timeout was much too short). Once I fixed that the test passes.

[mgedmin]

Ha ha no it doesn't. The race is harder to hit, perhaps, but it's still possible. And the test run time went from 14s to 40 :(.

[icemac]

@mgedmin Is this issue still valid or can it be closed?

Currently the tests take about 80 s on Python 3.11 in GHA. So it does not seem to be faster than 8 years ago.

[mgedmin]

I have no plans to work on this, so I suppose it can be closed.