[distcc] distcc speedup

Martin Pool mbp at samba.org
Mon Nov 11 22:36:00 GMT 2002


On 11 Nov 2002, Michael Santy <mike.santy at dynetics.com> wrote:
> All,
> 
> In looking at the sources to distcc in adding support for MSVC, it 
> appears that the preprocessed source is being written to disk on the 
> client, and read from the disk and sent to a server.  Wouldn't it be 
> faster to tell the compiler to output the preprocessed source to stdout, 
> and redirect that directly to the server?  Maybe I'm missing
> something.....

The current network protocol sends the size of a file before the
contents of the file.  Therefore, we can't send the file until it has
been completely generated and we know how long it is.

Other methods (end marked by a magic character, chunking, etc) are
possible but perhaps not clearly better.

On good operating systems, the preprocessed source should never need
to actually touch the disk platter -- it will just go into cache and
straight back out again.

-- 
Martin

They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction. 
	-- Janet Reno



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