Hi all, I just subscribed to the list and thought I would introduce myself and report my success with distcc.
Two weeks ago, a colleague of mine asked me if I knew distcc, and whether I thought we could use it to speed up compilation of our large projects. I had of course heard of it, and knew that my GNU/Linux distribution even shipped with a package of it, but had never actually given it a try. As a developer working on the Linux kernel and other open-source projects written in C, I happen to use gcc quite frequently. I don't have a recent and powerful computer, but instead have 3 older machines. And my girlfriend does have a recent, faster machine. Total computation power would exceed 8000 bogomips. So I thought the time had come for me to give a try to distcc. Learning how to get it to work was really quick and easy. Of course, I did a few beginner's mistakes (trying to monitor the jobs from a different account, or forgetting the -j parameter to make and blaming distcc for not distributing the workload) but now that I'm used to it, it's working just fine and easy. I even compiled 2.16 from the sources to have a (gtk-only) distccmon-gnome, which is quite a nice tool to have. Want figures? Typical kernel compilation time dropped from 15 minutes to 6 minutes. I definitely appreciate that. I found that including the significantly slowest machine into the farm would not help, and would even make things slower, because the linker would always have to wait for it while all other systems are done with their respective jobs. So I am using the three faster machines for optimal results. So I really have to thank Martin and all the contributors to the distcc project for coming up with such an helpful tool :) With your permission, I'll lurk here for some times while using distcc. I noticed some strange behaviors from times to times, but will keep quiet until I have isolated the problems, if they do exist. I'll try to help if I can, but you may know how busy my other projects are keeping me, so I wouldn't promise anything. Thanks, Jean Delvare __ distcc mailing list http://distcc.samba.org/ To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/distcc
