I posted a change to TryChooser that will fetch the build queue and display it when selecting tests. Do your part by avoiding platforms with large queues if possible to get your results faster and help reduce contention.
TryChooser Load: Avoid platforms with high numbers.
I tip my hat to you for an excellent idea.
Is it right that the test queue numbers can be misleading? For example, I just looked and the Linux64 test queue number was 31, and the Win32 test queue number was 0. But I think this was because in the latest job the Linux64 build had finished and so the tests had started, whereas the Win32 tests had not yet started.
One quibble: the helpful caption “TryChooser Load: Avoid platforms with high numbers.” does not appear on the page itself. It would be great if it did. Also, it looks like the numbers sometimes show up in red, but the meaning of this isn’t totally clear.
The test queue number can indeed be misleading. The way the data is reported and the jobs are pooled has a non trivial mapping. I worked with releng to come up with a decent approximation but it may not be exact. The queue don’t including jobs which are running and don’t include test which haven’t been scheduled yet cause the builds are pending. Does that explain what you saw?
The red color is just the number of jobs/500 so will get brighter red as the number of jobs approach 500. I can add a caption next time I modify trychooser.