Luke-Jr wrote: > When you have 100 systems, you can probably have the main one do nothing but > processing to send it out to the others... Or is that what you did?
Yes, that's what I did. Let me describe it exactly. I have two fast boxes. Each is a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 w/ hyperthreading, 2 GB RAM. I have one slow box. It's a Celeron 466 MHz w/ 512 MB RAM. All run Gentoo, of course. All connected via 100 Mbit ethernet. I built on the Celeron, with DISTCC_HOSTS set to "fast1/5 fast2/5". I watched performance on all three boxes using gkrellm2. gkrellm showed the Celeron 100% CPU bound for most of the build, and showed that the fast boxes had very "jaggy" CPU utilization that averaged around 30-40% during the compilation phase. (By "jaggy" I mean that one second would be 90% CPU, the next is 15%, the next is 100%, etc. It appears that when the fast box gets a job, it finishes it in a second or so and goes back to waiting.) I guesstimated that the two fast boxes might have roughly 8-10X the performance of the slow box. I could be off by a bit. I don't have a large fleet of identical boxes to try this on. -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
