Moving XS-APItest in harness testing

Is there any reason not to move these tests away from the cpan, dist, 
ext tests? and into the tests for the core?

I have a smoke-me that does this, if you'd like to see how it impacts 
your testing performance.

https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/shortlog/refs/heads/smoke-me/khw-harness

This two line change improved my elapsed 'make test' time by 9% on an 8 
effective core system.

Presumably the reason we do base first is because if it's failing, 
nothing is going to work.  Then we do the other core tests, in parallel. 
  Then we wait for those to finish before starting up the remainder of 
the tests.  Those are done in alphabetical order in a given test 
directory, presumably because cpan tests like to have a specified order, 
and have named their tests accordingly.  But we do the longest-running 
directories first.

But the API tests for XS code are not even dependent on base working. 
But since base is fast, there's no real gain in doing them parallel with 
base.  But there is no reason I can see, except tradition, not to do 
them in parallel with the rest of the core tests.

I also think there should be a way to tell harness to run cpan etc in 
parallel with core.  A lot of time seems to be wasted waiting for all of 
core to finish before these start.  On many-core systems like dromedary, 
this is a significant fraction of the elapsed time.  One wouldn't want 
this to be the default, but I think an expert-level option is called for.

• Moving XS-APItest in harness testing by Karl Williamson
• Re: Moving XS-APItest in harness testing by James E Keenan
• Re: Moving XS-APItest in harness testing by James E Keenan