Unison Track Consistently Timing Out

Exercism Support
1

Hello, I’m having a frustrating experience with the Unison track where despite all the tests passing locally the first time I submit my exercise the test runner will time out.

At this point I’m skeptical whenever I see a timeout that the issue is due to inefficiency in my code. I’ve submitted my solution for Allergies 10x now and it continues to fail despite the solution being rather simple.

Additionally, each time I submit the test runner the UI displays “Pending” followed by “Passed” only to flip to “Failed” a second later.

It feels bad to appear as if I’ve done 10x+ iterations when I’m really still on my first one.

Ideally, if I’m submitting the same solution w/ the past failure due to a timeout I’d like to have it retry the test w/o burning a new iteration.

If you’d like to check my work, you can find my solution here: averon's solution for Allergies in Unison on Exercism

2

Half an hour later, after 14 submissions of the same implementation it has finally accepted my solution as “Passed”.

3

Interestingly, looking back my Iteration #5 (I deleted the first 4) now displays as passing despite initially coming back as timed out.

If it was queued up or something, improved user feedback would have prevented me from continuing to submit solutions and wasting resources and becoming frustrated.

4

I was having similar problems with the Swift track, which I resolved by giving up. My impression is that it must be successfully validating the solution, but timing out as it tries to do something else.

5

Hi @averon, I’m a Unison track maintainer here! Apologies for the slowness in the Unison test runner! I can see if there’s anything amiss with the Unison executable, but it might be some combination of network and infrastructure latency that is beyond my ability to fix. Sometimes to check if my solution is timing out legitimately, I’ll copy the test and implementation locally to a .u suffixed file and run them against a local installation of the UCM. I realize that may not be a workable fix for everyone though! In any case, thanks for giving Unison a try!

6

There’s reports of timeouts in the Julia track as well. It might or might not be related :man_shrugging:

7

Thanks @rlmark , I’m very much enjoying learning Unison and Exercism has been a great resource.

Based on other comments and similar experiences with other tracks I wouldn’t be surprised if it is an infrastructure or front-end issue separate and apart from the Unison track specifically.

I appreciate all you do to maintain and improve the experience for new Unison language learners like myself!

2 Likes
8

Hello, I am also very much enjoying learning Unison and appreciate all the hard work that is put into the Unison track!

However since I started the track a few days ago I have not been able to submit a single exercise without the tests failing due to a timeout (despite all tests passing locally).
This is even the case for the Hello World exercise where the issue obviously shouldn’t be due to inefficiency in my implementation.
I don’t have this problem on other tracks and therefor suppose that it has something to do with the Unison test runner.

Having all exercises fail due to a timeout is very frustrating and makes me even consider working on a different track as long as the issue is not fixed.
However I would really like to continue working on the Unison track and hope that in case others also have these timeouts someone will be able to identify the problem.