[distcc] Remote Fallback

Thomas Walker Thomas.Walker at morganstanley.com
Wed May 21 19:18:23 GMT 2003


You are correct about the reasoning... I am going to have a very large number of
backend servers in the list that may, on occasion, not be available.  I was
looking at just carefully managing the list so that I make sure that everything
in it is good but that adds a reasonably significant amount of overhead.  I've
seen people on this list wondering whether distcc could be made to try other
remote hosts before falling back but never saw a response.  I was looking at the
2.3 code yesterday and it seemed to require a reasonably intrusive patch (make
the hostlist static and reorder how some things are done in distcc.c to make the
retry logic possible without repeating some things unnecessarily) but it sounds
like you may have already made some of the changes I would need in 2.4.
I'll take a look at the new code and see what I can do...

Tom.

Martin Pool wrote:

> On 20 May 2003, Thomas Walker <Thomas.Walker at morganstanley.com> wrote:
> > What is the working status on implementing remote fallbacks?  i.e. if I
> > fail to contact a remote host, have it try another remote host rather
> > than fallback to localhost or fail (as per DISTCC_FALLBACK).  I see that
> > there is space in the 2.3 code for this to be implemented but that its
> > masked at the moment.  Is this something that anyone has bothered to
> > implement that just hasn't made it into the mainstream release yet or
> > has it not been done?
> > I'm in need of this functionality and am willing to do it myself but
> > don't want to duplicate effort.
>
> Can you tell us more about why it's needed for your situation?
>
> I'm guessing it's because you have a lot of servers, and machines in
> the list that are sometimes inaccessible.
>
> It should be straightforward to implement.  The only subtlety is
> making sure that it tries each remote host only once.
>
> It might in fact be better after trying a few the remote hosts to just
> give up and assume that the client is in fact disconnected from the
> network.  Trying to connect to unavailable machines has a cost.
>
> I'll add intelligence about remembering unusable hosts shortly and
> that should mitigate some problems.
>
> > I could add options to DISTCC_FALLBACK (but leave it backwards
> > compatable with old options) or throw in another switch, any
> > preferences? (distcc seems to lean towards a whole bunch of boolean
> > switches rather than ternary or more way options).
>
> If it's implemented properly I think it should be OK to leave it
> always on.
>
> --
> Martin
>
> linux.conf.au 2004: Adelaide, Australia         http://lca2004.linux.org.au/
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