Currently, we host VisIt's test results "dashboard" via https from /project at NERSC. Because our subversion repo wasn't hosted via http their as well (or was but that functionality was removed), we took to copying a ton of test result (e.g. baselines) content from our repo to the "dashboard" (as opposed to simply linking to it) for each test run.
On NERSC's /project, that was hugely abusive (due to file block size quantification), each test run taking ~1.5Gb, whereas the same html dir-tree on Linux is ~100Mb. When we include savings due to even modest revision of the way we gen dashboard results, I believe it is possible to cut per-test storage cost < ~10Mb per run (way less when all/most tests pass).
With GitHub limit of 1000Mb on repo and gh-pages served site, that would allow us to host 100+ past results without exceeding GitHub limits. At 3-5 modes per night, thats >20-33 past results which I think is perfectly sufficient for our needs.
Beyond the fact that GitHub pages site is an available resource and we can make it work, I see a number of advantages in moving this aspect of our project to GitHub...
- We are no longer dependent on NERSC /project or NERSC servers to host test dashboard
- GitHub is a large company with a lot of experience hosting a lot of projects. It doesn't break down.
- We don't need special access (ssh proxy with 1 week limits) to publish results
- More core developers have more natural/immediate access to affect changes or respond to things when they break
- It makes VisIt development more one-stop-shopping @ GitHub instead of a frankenstien of resources (which I see value in getting away from)
- We have a lot of tools for controlling look and feel of the dashboard site
- We can support test results from multiple user's runs who wouldn't ordinarily have an account on NERSC to scp results to.
I think several similar arguments apply to content on visit.llnl.gov...we should move it to a gh-pages site and have visit.llnl.gov simply re-direct to that new site. Its easier to modify, update, change look and feel, etc.
For an example of what I am talking about, see here...
https://visit-dav.github.io/dashboard/
In particular, follow the "Test" tab to get to very simple brute-force copy of a recent test result. None of the other links there work because I was just trying to stand up a simple demo of what is possible and, in particular, show that emulating the current look-and-feel is totally doable, but that we can easily edit the content ourselves, as I did to add the "Test" tab.