We have run into a problem with the steal production build failing silently, some times, on some machines. When it fails it just displays "Building to foo/" and then stops.
There are no error messages. On machines that this happens on it happens basically randomly.
On the build server that we are having to use (a somewhat underpowered hosted Windows VM) it fails most of the time. Meaning that if you run the build 20 times, it will work once and fail the other 19 times.
We ran the build repeatedly on some other, better, non-virtual, servers. On one it never failed (in the 30 builds it did) on the other it failed once in every 10 builds or so.
I managed to reproduce the problem on my development environment. I run Windows 7 inside a Virtual Box VM on OSX. I managed to reproduce the problem by changing the number of CPU cores presented by the VM from 2 to 1. When I do that, the steal build will fail 75% of the time.
If I create a completely new javascriptmvc app, that doesn't fail to build. If I progressively remove steals from our app, as there are less steals it will fail to build less often.
I tried running the build in the rhino debugger. When the build failed there were no exceptions or messages on the console.
We have several existing big complex javascriptmvc apps, so I went back and tried building those under the same circumstances (to check there was nothing odd about our current apps). Sure enough, on my single core VM the old apps fail to build the same way.
To test I am building from the command line with:
- js journeyplanner\scripts\build.js
- Building to journeyplanner/
(though I have tried various other ways of building too)
We are using javascriptmvc 3.2.4
Has anyone seen this before ?
Does anyone have any suggestions to fix it ?
Is there any further way of debugging it, beyond single stepping through in rhino ?