Fun with distcc and 41 PCs

[Z-Man]

Though I'd give the AMD64 machines at our institute something meaningful to do Set CXX to "distcc g++" and did in the Eclipse build module that builds client and server in debug and optimized mode (that's four builds):

Code: Select all

moos@l04:~/Tron/0.2.8/build$ find . -name src -exec make -C \{\} clean \;
<snip>
moos@l04:~/Tron/0.2.8/build$ time make -j 40 all
<snip>
real    1m39.215s
user    0m54.629s
sys     0m26.887s

Mwahahaha! Unfortunately, it's not much faster than with 5 or 10 PCs, because the build manager has to do the preprocessing all alone.

Notes: The cleaning removed all compilation results and the documentation. I'm using distcc over SSH because I don't want to have to maintain 40 running distccds, although that could accelerate things a bit more.

[Tank Program]

Using distcc here at home with my x86's I've gotten a kernel compile down to under 2 minutes. It was blazing. But, I often find that distcc does unexpected things... Especially with cross compilation.

[Z-Man]

Yeah, you absolutely have to have identical setups.