On Saturday, 26 February 2022 22:47:52 GMT Ramces Tampo-og Red wrote: > Yeah, I was just thinking about that since building a powerful, new > computer around my area is prohibitively expensive. But getting old, > prebuilt computers is ludicrously cheap. I figured that I can get a few > of them for $50-75 and just plug them to an ethernet switch to do the > compiling for me.
Distributed compiling may not be as useful as you think. Not all phases of a
build can be distributed, pre-processing and linking will still take a lot of
time, some packages will not compile over distcc and will fail, any gains in
compiling time could be eaten away by network losses, etc. On the other hand
a 'better' PC with more RAM and a faster CPU with more cores could prove
transformative in its performance impact, when used as a building server for
binary packages to be installed thereafter on slower systems.
I have found older PCs with limited resources eventually reach an EOL as far
as their capability to emerge large packages. I have a very old Core 2 Duo
Pentium laptop with 4G RAM, which even with MAKEOPTS="-j1" takes forever to
build qtwebengine:
genlop -t dev-qt/qtwebengine
Fri Feb 4 20:06:46 2022 >>> dev-qt/qtwebengine-5.15.2_p20211216
merge time: 1 day, 3 hours, 12 minutes and 7 seconds.
Chromium got so slow over the years, I stopped emerging it long ago.
Give distcc a go if you have a spare PC to experiment and want to test %
improvements with your setup, but personally I wouldn't invest money on it.
Instead I'd save up for a faster machine. YMMV.
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