[distcc] distcc gives sixfold speedup

[Martin Pool]

An anonymous distcc user reported a nearly sixfold improvement in
compilation speed, by distributing from his PC to a group of little
Celeron machines.

Considering that you can probably pick up 20 second-hand Celerons for
the cost of a good new PC it's a pretty good deal.

> 3. Your codebase: lines of code (by wc -l), and language:
>     60k C++
> 4. Your machines: number, OS, processor, memory, network connectivity:
>     Build master:  1.1GHz athlon 512M
>     distccd servers:  24x 400MHz celeron, 128M
>     Connectivity: switched 100Mbit ether
> 5. Time to compile, with and without distcc:
>      Without:  10 min 43 sec
>      With:      1 min 49 sec
> 6. Any other observations:
>      If (say, due to a reboot) distccd isn't running on the distccd
>      servers, "make -j 24" ends up spawning 24 copies of g++ on the
>      build master, which harms interactive response, to put it
>      lightly.  (it sometimes takes a few 10s of seconds to get control
>      back to kill the make)

>      Nonetheless, distcc is great.

-- 
Martin 

I think the environment without razorwire will have much more
amenity associated with it.
	-- Phillip Ruddock, Australian Minister for Immigration