Sergey Petrunya writes:

One can now frequently observe buildbot to be in this state:

hardy-amd64-makedist (idle with 1 pending) hardy-amd64-newtest (building with 1 pending)

I interpret it as follows: makedist is waiting for newtest to complete. The problem with that is that when one is working on a windows problem, he has to wait for newtest to complete for every push.

Yes. Both are running on the same machine (in my office). So far, it was configured to only run one build at a time.

The only was I see to fix this is to have a dedicated buildslave for makedist jobs, i.e. with current settings hardy should run two buildslaves, one working on makedist and the other on newtest.

Is there a better way to address this?

I think Buildbot allows to run multiple builds in parallel on a single slave. I configured my box to allow two simultaneous builds. We will see if it can handle the load (on of them runs --big tests, which can make quite a load on a machine). (I was planning to try this anyway after putting more memory into the box; good that you reminded me). - Kristian.