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Optimizing distcc

Posted by michael on from the barn-raising dept.

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. strlen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yep, root of all evil. strlen. Fix strings and you'll fix everything.

  2. Wow... by JoeLinux · · Score: 5, Funny

    For some reason, "Imagine a beowulf clusters using this" is on-topic.

    This is so weird.

    I must drink now.

    "I do NOT suffer from a mental condition. I'm enjoying every second of it."

  3. Website bit slow... by neonstz · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...maybe you should work on disthttpd next?

  4. Nice big article by wildzeke · · Score: 5, Funny

    By the time I read the article, my kdelibs was compiled.

  5. Distccd for cygwin by aberant · · Score: 5, Informative

    My life changed the day i found out i could get my super fast P4 Windows XP box to compile for my slow linux box. Distcc for cygwin is a miracle. check out the thread at Gentoo forums

  6. Martin Pool interview by Wise+Dragon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Martin Pool, the brains behind distcc, was interviewed by ZDNet yesterday. How timely.

    http://web.zdnet.com.au/builder/program/work/sto ry /0,2000034960,20283318-1,00.htm

  7. Re:Gentoo Impact(s) by y2dt · · Score: 5, Informative

    official gentoo distcc guide:
    http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml

  8. Re:behind the XCode curtain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yup, look at the X code preferences for distributed builds. The cool part is they use Rendezvous to automatically find machines to send work. You can set your box to use these others and/or offer service to others. Also on dual processor boxes is will treat them as two machines and do two compiles at once.

    Anyway, you can see distcc running when you have X code enabled for distributed builds and running.

    --jim

  9. Recursive Make Considered Harmful by JWhitlock · · Score: 5, Informative
    There was an interesting paper by Peter Miller in 1997 called "Recursive Make Considered Harmful". It makes a good case for why recursive make is a bad idea, slowing down compile times and clouding dependancies. Benjamin Meyer has proved the point again, with his use of unsermake - if you generate a non-recursive make, then distributed compiles are twice as fast.

    Unfortunately, the makefile creator most people use, automake, creates only recursive makefiles. Maybe a replacement like unsermake will get automake developers thinking about radical changes. I wouldn't mind seeing M4 go away, for one.