Recent Blog Posts

+ As the usage of Jenkins expands, we started seeing users who run multiple 100s of agents on one controller, and thus it became a lot more important for us to scale well to even larger number of agents. + + + While I was looking at the thread dump of a large system, I started noticing that there are a large number of threads lying around pumping `+InputStream+` and writing to another `+OutputStream+`. On Linux, each thread occupies 2MB just for its stack size, so if we can eliminate some of them, it'd be a good saving. + + + So this morning, I tackled one source of such waste. + + + Jenkins has https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/SSH+Slaves+plugin[the ability to launch agent on a remote server via SSH] for the longest time, and to simplify this, we've been using a https://github.com/jenkinsci/trilead-ssh2[pure-Java implementation of SSH client]. + + + To cut the long story short, I was able to eliminate two pump threads per every SSH connection. Furthermore, when it runs on the upcoming Jenkins 1.521, it'll save one more thread per every SSH connection. So if you have 100 agents connected through SSH, this alone saves up 600MB of memory. That's pretty good for a few hours work! + + + If you run a lot of agents, be sure to pick up version 0.27 of https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/SSH+Slaves+plugin[the SSH agents plugin] to take advantages of this! +

Your favorite Butler will visit Israel on June 6 for the Jenkins User Conference Israel. More than 200 people have already registered to hobnob with other Jenkins users and eat like kings. The agenda is up here. You’ll find a great list of speakers from Israel, Europe and the US to compliment a plethora of treats. There will be an ice cream break, fruits break, beer break and special chef lunch. And everyone gets a limited-edition JUC Israel t-shirt, designed by the t-shirt-design gurus at JFrog. Featured speakers: Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of Jenkins (formerly, Hudson) and elite architect at CloudBees, will deliver a keynote about the current state and the future roadmap of Jenkins. Hans Dockter, the creator of Gradle and the founder of Gradleware will speak about next generation build tool to CI server integration. Fred Simon, JFrog’s co-founder and Chef architect will share JFrog’s vision of the future of continous integration in the cloud. ** Many thanks to lead sponsors JFrog and CloudBees, who have put a lot of time and energy into organizing the conference. Thanks also to sponsors Cloudify and White Source for showing their support for Jenkins! Register here. Can’t make it to Israel? Here are more Jenkins events: Moving to Continuous Delivery in the Enterprise — June 10, London Jenkins Meetup — June 15, Munich Jenkins User Event — September 6, Copenhagen Jenkins User Conference — October 23, Palo Alto, CA

Volume 4 of Continuous Information came out last night. It contains insights and highlights from founder Kohsuke, the latest growth stats, upcoming event info, Jenkins resources, and more. Highlights: Jenkins has nearly 20,000 more active installations than it had last June, up from 43,500 to more than 61,000 Nearly 100 plugins have been added since late last Fall when we did the last Jenkins survey. Now there are more than 730 plugins Bay Area JUC (Oct 23), JUC Israel (Jun 6) and several other Jenkins events around the world have open registration Latest, greatest Jenkins improvements include a new LTS based on 1.509, more context menu improvements, and controller/agent data transfer performance improvement There’s also a Security advisory out recommending upgrade to at least 1.502 A plethora of Jenkins and Continuous Delivery resources + + https://pages.cloudbees.com/index.php/email/emailWebview?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRow5%2FmYJoDpwmWGd5mht7VzDtPj1OY6hBomJr6JK1TtuMFUGpsqOOqSDhcUEZVk0w%3D%3D[View the full newsletter], and then https://www.cloudbees.com/jenkins/jenkins-ci/jenkins-newsletter.cb[sign up to receive it yourself]. + + And if you have content to feature in a future newsletter, please mailto:continuous-information@cloudbees.com[email us]. + + + + + +

This year, the West Coast Jenkins User Conference will be in Palo Alto rather than San Francisco. If you’re nearby — or even if you’re not — join Kohsuke and other fellow developers for a solid day of Jenkins. The Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2013 The Venue: Palo Alto Jewish Community Center Details Register The Call for Papers is open until June 9 (scroll to bottom of page for form). JUC will be much better with your involvement, so please submit your abstracts and share your Jenkins knowledge with the community. image::https://www.cloudbees.com/sites/default/files/Kohsuke-Kawaguchi-Opening-San-Fran-Thumbnail.png [Kohsuke Kawaguchi – Keynote Address, JUC San Francisco,link=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXEbFfAeymw?rel=0?autoplay=1&rel=1&modestbranding=1&showsearch=0] A very special thanks to our JUC Palo Alto sponsors, who will make sure you are fed, caffeinated, clothed (in this year’s collectible Jenkins tshirt), and generally well cared for at the conference: CloudBees, JFrog, XebiaLabs, appvance, ZeroTurnaround, LMIT Software, Black Diamond Software, New Relic, Liferay, AppDynamics, and SOASTA. Two other differences this year — the conference is not timed to coincide with JavaOne, and it falls on a Wednesday rather than a Sunday. We thought we’d try these changes and are interested to know if they work better for everyone. The agenda won’t be populated until after the Call for Papers closes and talks are selected. But you can check out previous JUC agendas, slides, and video: 2012 JUC San Francisco Inaugural JUC San Francisco - 2011 If JUC Palo Alto is not convenient for you, there’s also a JUC coming up in Herzelia, Israel on June 6 and a Jenkins event planned for Copenhagen, Denmark on September 6. Hope you can join us at JUC!

+ image:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Toasting_Champagne.jpg/171px-Toasting_Champagne.jpg[image] + + + + The last week the Jenkins project has reached a miletone release — https://jenkins-ci.org/changelog[Version 1.500]. That's no 1.5 nor 1.5.0. That's the 501st release since its inception, counting all the way up from 1.0, 1.1 to 1.500. + + + We'll be celebrating this release in https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/FOSDEM[the upcoming FOSDEM conference] in Brussels, but I wanted to thank everyone for making this great community possible by participating and using it. + + + Despite https://jenkins-ci.org/changelog-old.html[all] https://jenkins-ci.org/why[the] https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Governance+Meeting+Agenda[distances] we've thus far come, there are https://www.slideshare.net/kohsuke/jenkins-user-conference-2012-san-francisco[still a lot of work] to be done, both in the core and plugins, so we look forward to keep on keeping on in the coming years. + + + So here is to the next 500 release!

+ People in far eastern countries use languages that are quite different from English, and live in a time zone that's largely incompatible from the U.S./Europe time. So naturally these folks tend to keep things to themselves. + + + That's why I've been wanting to do a meet-up in Seoul for some time, yet I didn't know anyone there to get one going. That changed in Jenkins User Conferene in San Francisco last year. I pitched this to someone who worked for Samsung, and he introduced me to folks in Seoul, and the ball started rolling from there. + + + The meet-up was held Friday, at Samsung headquarter in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0&list=PLEC422D53B7588DC7&index=10[Gangnam], Seoul. + + + image:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Samsung_headquarters.jpg/320px-Samsung_headquarters.jpg[image] + + + + I kicked off the meet-up with a short presentation on why I think local communities are important, especially in Korea. Jang Seung-heui from Samsung then talked about Groovy scripting in Jenkins, and how it helps him manage a large installation of Jenkins (the slides and the talk were in Korean, so this is my guess based on the occasional English words that appeared in slides.) Junho Yoon from NHN talked about his simple update site plugin to show how he helps teams run their own Jenkins instances. I've done another presentation showing various Jenkins plugins for workflow-ish things. + + + + + I wasn't sure how many people would actually come, since I really didn't have any reach in the Korean software developer community. But somehow the words must have spread, as I counted more than 50 people in the room. + + + + + Unfortunately, due to the rules in the building, I wasn't allowed to record the talks. So no videos from this meet-up — if you missed this one, you'd have to come to the next one! + + + After the meet-up, a dozen of us headed to the busy night scene in Gangnam. There were so many people that we had to form a line to get to the street! + + + Eventually we found ourselves in a German-style pub. I say German "style" because everything from beer to foods were Korean, except the name of the pub and the wall paper. + + + + + I've pitched my hope that we keep it going, and that there'll be the next meet-up. Judging from https://www.meetup.com/jenkinsmeetup/events/90236092/[the feedbacks on the meetup.com] and Twitter, I'm optimistic: + + @https://twitter.com/kyunamjo[kyunamjo] @https://twitter.com/kohsukekawa[kohsukekawa] Kohsuke, please push him constantly to put his effort to settle a local community for Jenkins. He wishes to do that. — 김상희 SangHee Kim (@sangheestyle) January 25, 2013 + + + + The book Junho is holding contains some chapters about Jenkins that he wrote: + + + + + After drink-up, Junho kidnapped me into a coffee shop and showed me a lot more that he has done for NHN that I presumably cannot talk about in public. I've encouraged him to try to split the generic parts from company specific parts and open-source the former, so we'll see. By the time I headed back to hotel, it was past midnight. + + + I wanted to thank folks from Samsung for making this possible. If you are interested in stay connected, please join https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/jenkinsci-kr[the mailing list]. + +

Earlier this year we participated in FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, Belgium. Overall the event was a major success and we’re very happy we were able to take part in it! For FOSDEM 2013, we’ll be back in Brussels and participating in a major way. The first day of FOSDEM (February 2, 2013) will be the 2nd birthday for the Jenkins project, and seems appropriate that project founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi will be giving a keynote session titled: " How we made the Jenkins community " Here’s an excerpt from Kohsuke’s talk proposal: Jenkins project has an interesting history. It started from scratch on my spare time, and grow over time to boast 600+ open-source plugins developed by 300+ contributors from all around the world. There are several key ingredients, both technical and social, that enabled this model, and I think those ingredients are useful to other projects. In this talk, I’ll discuss how Jenkins project and the community works, what these ingredients are, why they help you attract more developers into your projects, and why it matters. You can read more about Kohsuke’s keynote here In addition to the keynote, I ( R. Tyler Croy), and a number of members of the Jenkins, Cucumber and Selenium communities are hosting the first ever Testing and Automation devroom at FOSDEM. If you’re interested in submitting a talk proposal for the dev room the deadline is 23:59 UTC on December 21st 2012! The Call for Proposals can be found here, and the proposal submission form can can be found here. We are very likely going to have a table in the hall again this year, but the FOSDEM committee hasn’t yet confirmed whether or not we will have a table. Regardless, a lot of Jenkins community members will be at FOSDEM in February in addition to hundreds of other open source contributors and users from around the world. If you’re interested in participating and/or meeting up with the Jenkins crowd, there’s details coming together on the FOSDEM wiki page . We hope to see you there!

+ image:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Paid-surveys.jpg[image,width=200] + + + + Just like https://blog.cloudbees.com/2011/12/jenkins-community-survey-results-82.html[the last year], link:/survey[we are running a survey this year], to get some objective insights into what our users would like to see in the project. Obviously, the developers in the project deal with https://issues.jenkins.io[individual bug reports and feature requests] all the time, but sometimes those day-to-day issues distract you from a bigger picture. + + + This year, we kept some of the questions the same, so that we can see the trend. But we also http://meetings.jenkins-ci.org/jenkins/2012/jenkins.2012-09-19-18.00.log.html#l-142[discussed what we wanted to ask] among ourselves and revised some more. + + + The tricky thing about being an open-source project is that it's not like some of us can actually decide what we'll be working on — in the end it's up to individual contributors to decide what they want to work on. So I can't make promises, but in a way, that's precisely why we'd like to get these objective, measurable, quantitative feedbacks. It lets us discuss how to solve the problem, instead of spending time discussing what the problem is. + + + Last year, we've heard loud and clear that people wanted to see some UI improvements. So a bunch of us sit down at link:/blog/2012/02/21/fosdem-2012-recap/[FOSDEM], picked up several key UI improvements, and https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/UI+Enhancements[we've actually delivered on those]. This year I hope to do the same. + + + The survey will close at the end of October, and if you participate, you'll get to see the results first. As an added incentive, CloudBees had pitched in a $100 Amazon gift card. So https://jenkins-ci.org/survey[please let your voice be heard].