[distcc] Re: Finding peers: zeroconf/rendezvous?

Paul_Donovan at scee.net Paul_Donovan at scee.net
Wed Feb 26 09:56:49 GMT 2003


Martin Pool wrote:
>On 25 Feb 2003, Bret Mogilefsky <mogul at gelatinous.com> wrote:
>
>
>> The compiler for the PS2 is gcc, and various game developers have
>> complained about it being slow.  I'd like to include distcc with gcc
>> to make this less of a problem.

Not that there's any reason to not believe Brett, but I can confirm that
PS2 developers have to endure long build times :-) The project I'm working
on involves nearly 20 people having to build 380,000 lines of code,
numerous times a day. The build on dual Xeon 1.7GHz machines takes nearly
30 minutes.  That's why I've been looking at distcc myself.

Late last year I managed to get our build process - which uses a variant of
Sony's GCC from SN Systems under Win2k - to work with distcc. 4 machines
could do a full build in 8 minutes. We are not using it currently because
of a few problems (the main one being that if the remote machines weren't
available, the localhost ended up doing 8 cc processes, which absolutely
kills a Cygwin machine). When my current project finishes (any day now), I
will look at it again.

> B - people have two very slightly different gcc binaries in
>     circulation, and so their builds fail in confusing and subtle
>     ways.
>
>It is very unfortunate that B can occur, but because of e.g. vendors
>patching gcc without updating the version number, it has happened.
>(Perhaps Sony would never be so naughty :-)
>

That's not a problem. Most (all?) PS2 projects are build using one version
of the compiler - we do enough hacks in our code that it'll usually only
compile on one version of a compiler anyway ;-) I am responsible for
managing the tools in our studio, so I can ensure we all use the same
system. In fact, I use an rsync server to distribute the toolchain :-)

--
Paul Donovan
Senior Programmer
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Cambridge Studio







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