[distcc] Re: RFC: new protocol draft

Martin Pool mbp at sourcefrog.net
Tue May 6 10:26:40 GMT 2003


On  6 May 2003, Ben Elliston <bje at wasabisystems.com> wrote:
> Martin Pool <mbp at samba.org> writes:
> 
> >   - allowing reuse of connections
> 
> What did you have in mind for this?  Using a TCP hack like IIS/IE?

Yes, I'm going to use my proprietary control over the Linux kernel to
make Alexei put in a shortsighted non-standards-compliant hack.  Or
maybe not. :-)

More seriously: keeping connections open over several requests, more
or less as in HTTP.  This is not a big deal for plain TCP because
distcc will probably be used on local networks where opening a
connection takes epsilon time.  For SSH it is pretty useful because
opening a connection takes many roundtrips and a lot of computation.

(You might use fsh, but it too takes a few roundtrips and because it's
written in Python (much as I like Python) it takes a fair number of
cycles.  For CVS on slow networks this is not a big deal; for distcc
it might be.  I haven't measured.)

I had in mind that there would be a long-lived client process started
implicitly when you first connect to a host.  It will hold open
SSH connections and pass them out as needed.  Connections are passed
between the long lived process and distcc invocations using
file-descriptor passing over a Unix domain socket.

Sound good?

--
Martin


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