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Optimizing distcc

IceFox writes "Having fallen in love with distcc and its ability to speed up compiling (insert anyone who compiles like Gentoo users or Linux developers). I recently got the chance to dive deeper into distcc. By itself distcc will decrease your build times, but did you know that if you tweak a few things you can get a whole lot better compile times? Through a lot of trial and error, tips from others, profiling, testing and just playing around with distcc, I have put together a nice big article. It shows how developers can get a bigger bang for their buck out of their old computers and distcc with just a few changes."

9 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. behind the XCode curtain by pohl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is cool...I learned something on slashdot today. On a hunch I got a bash shell on my OSX box at home and typed "dist--", and lo there be distcc already installed and ready to go. That must be what they use for distributed builds in XCode

    --

    The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...

  2. Re:I wonder... by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If he was only interested in helping himself he wouldn't have bothered with a nice writeup for all us to read.

  3. Re:I wonder... by Lord+of+Ironhand · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If everyone measured the value of his actions only by the time it will save him/herself, there probably wouldn't be much of a free software community these days.

  4. PHP article? by Vellmont · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you knew you were going to be slashdotted, wouldn't you link to a static version of the article instead of one running a PHP script?

    --
    AccountKiller
  5. Re:Copy of my article... by Lord+of+Ironhand · · Score: 1, Insightful
    Come on mods, he's the author of the article! At least give him some points for that!

    @IceFox: thanks. Great article.

  6. Re:Website bit slow... by Wolfier · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It sort of already exists...the name is "Bit Torrent"...

  7. Re:jobs/cpu? by vadim_t · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It seems to help a bit actually. Probably due to the idle times caused by disk I/O. While one job is reading/writing from the disk the other one can compile, for example.

  8. Re:Missed the best point by IceFox · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In the first paragraph I mention that you should use it and be familiar with it. Assuming that you already do use it, then the rest of the article applies about how you can improve a certain portion of it (distcc). You don't ignore all the books on optimizing C code just because there are plenty of algorithm books do you?

    -Benjamin Meyer

    --
    Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
  9. Re:Why wasn't a factorial experiment used? by alptraum · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Maybe because he's a system administrator and not a research scientist? That isn't a reason, you use the best solutions that are available for solving a problem type regardless of your position.

    DOE is widely implemented in especially manufacturing processes, however with just basic knowledge of DOE it is easy to see the applications to non-manufacturing processes as well. DOE is readily available in just about any statistics software worth using, R, SAS, Minitab, S-Plus, etc so even if you don't have much formal knowledge they are very easy to implement.

    Honestly, doesn't anybody pay attention in statistics classes? I mean for goodness sakes, I saved a major semiconductor producer millions by solving a problem that none of their engineering staff knew how to solve, and all I did was 1-way ANOVA, you have no idea how long I laughed over that one. 1-way ANOVA, that's covered in like first semester basic stats that engineers and physical scientists take, but from what I've heard atleast my school vast majority just blow the class off, and then they get their ass handed to them when their out in the real world by the stats guys, don't let it happen to you.