From time to time discussions start in (Jenkins Users) group on managing several Jenkins instances simultaneously. And each time there is a suggestion to merge these instances to a single one and leverage views and access control to separate domains.
Well, the single build server instance is easier to manage - to some extent.
It can provide more resources and computation power to its jobs.
But there are several strong reasons not to merge build servers.
- Administrative domain separation. Co-location of stuff belonging to different teams may be just prohibited.
- Performance. Smaller Jenkins servers boot faster. Also Jenkins has quite large memory footprint - 0.5 GB heap size is a minimum requirement for a modest installation. More jobs - more builds, more builds - larger heap. For multi GBytes heap GC delays may become an issue.
- There are also plugin-related issues. Such as Subversion credentials one - SVN plugin cannot log in with different credentials to a single authentication domain.
But if someone decides to run multiple build servers they should be installed at different (virtual) hosts. It is difficult to imagine a case when co-location of several Jenkins masters can be justified.
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