Maven build and tests very slow on Docker

Question

I'm trying setup my Gitlab CI/CD to compile and run tests for my Java/Maven/Spring Boot application. I've setup a Gitlab Runner and created my .gitlab-ci.yml and it all worked, but VERY SLOW. I've tried many configurations for my runner, without success.

So i made a step back and tried to run the tests on Docker on my local machine.

The build + tests running directly on my machine takes 17min. The build + tests running on docker takes more than 1h.

The best performance i've got was using using this docker command:

docker run -it --rm --name comp2 --mount type=bind,source="C:/ProjetosJava/eaud",destination=/usr/src/mymaven -e MAVEN_OPTS='-Xdebug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xmx4096m -Xms1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m -Dmaven.repo.local=.m2/repository -XX:+TieredCompilation -XX:TieredStopAtLevel=1' -w /usr/src/mymaven maven:3.3-jdk-8 /bin/bash

and inside bash i did:

mvn -s .m2/settings.xml clean compile test

I need the build inside docker to have at minimun a close time (17min).

Answer 1

Found out the problem, it was the Maven Surefire plugin.

By default, surefire will fork the JVM, and when it do that it doesn't inherit the JAVA_OPTS from the mvn command.

So, i was i able to reduce the time of the build by configuring these configurations to the plugin:

             <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>3.0.0-M5</version>
                <configuration>
                    <systemPropertyVariables>
                        <java.awt.headless>true</java.awt.headless>
                    </systemPropertyVariables>
                    <argLine>-Xms256m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Xverify:none -XX:TieredStopAtLevel=1 -XX:-TieredCompilation</argLine>
                    <printSummary>false</printSummary>
                    <forkCount>0</forkCount>
                </configuration>
                <dependencies>
                    <dependency>
                        <groupId>org.apache.maven.surefire</groupId>
                        <artifactId>surefire-junit47</artifactId>
                        <version>3.0.0-M5</version>
                    </dependency>
                </dependencies>
            </plugin>

The secret is: argLine with -Xverify:none -XX:TieredStopAtLevel=1 -XX:-TieredCompilation and forkCount=0.