[distcc] SMP volounteers + compression

[Marko Mikulicic]

Hi,

First, I want to say that distcc it's a very nice stuff.
I did something similar (makeitdisturbed, an anagram of "distributed 
make"), using ssh to spawn jobs. But it was required that the volouteers
mounted the filesystem, and have the same libs. I think, if one relly 
needed this and could have complete admin on the machines could better 
use openmosix.
  I like your solution (I was too lazy).
If I understood well, distcc does lock the volouteer until it the job
it is running is completed. I think it should be important to add some 
kind of queuing, to please SMP volounteers, and to improve "pipelining" 
even on UP machines. I thought of something like DISTCC_HOSTS="a b:2 c 
d:4 e:2" where the number after the colon is the queue depth for a given
volounteer, which defaults to 1.

  In addition, I was wondering if compression the preprocessed stream
could help improving performances, expecially when there are many 
volounteers. The compression should be chosen doing a tradeoff between
compress ratio and processing needs. (not gzip)

  What do you think ?

Marko Mikulicic