Several weeks ago, I started having problems with my media center where recorded shows started stuttering in playback. There were a huge number of variables that could have caused it as lots of things changed, like an update to EyeTV, update to my HDHomeRun, Xcode update, OS X Server update, etc. While I’m still trying to identify the cause, I think I’ve narrowed down the problem to Xcode and Xcode Server.
Why am I blaming Xcode? Well, I went into OS X Server and looked to disable it. It wasn’t turned on and didn’t have Xcode selected. Since I hadn’t turned it off and had selected a version of Xcode, I knew something went crazy. I selected Xcode again, restarted the Xcode Server and then turned it off. I noticed that even after I did this, there were still log entries related to Xcode Server. Huh? If I disabled it, why was it still doing stuff? I found a blog entry which identified a way to completely reset Xcode Server.
Before I had completely disabled Xcode Server, I had noticed periodic log entries about the server doing stuff which wasn’t a complete surprise as it had to check source code and do other things. However, the status showed a huge number of little spikes in CPU usage. After I disabled Xcode Server, the spikes stopped. When it wasn’t doing builds, it really shouldn’t have done much to warrant the CPU spikes.
I can’t say that I’m going to miss fighting Xcode server; I installed Jenkins and got it configured how I wanted my jobs configured. Jenkins, itself, was easy to setup and do the builds; the tricky part was getting my release notes to TestFlight and to get the archives named the way I wanted. Even though Jenkins is written in Java, I’m not seeing spikes in CPU usage; in fact, when idle, I’m seeing a decrease in CPU usage.