[distcc] distcc monitors

[Martin Pool]

On 28 Jul 2003, Frerich Raabe <raabe at kde.org> wrote:

> Hm yes, if the daemons would hold the information, it would e.g. be possible 
> to tell how long a particular node is up, how much work it has done so far 
> etc.. Right now those numbers are often not correct because you can only 
> start counting files, uptime etc. as soon as the monitor starts.

Right.  Is the uptime measured for the daemon, or the machine as a
whole?  If it's for the daemon, we won't be able to tell for inetd or
ssh connections.  I'm not really sure why uptime is meaningful.
(Well, on Windows I can guess. :-)

> > In the long term a Gantt-like chart as used in Incredibuild would
> > be cool.
> 
> Hm I'm not familiar with Gantt charts. Looking at the Incredibuild 
> screenshots, you mean something like this (hosts on vertical axis, time on 
> horizontal axis)?:
> 
> alpha		aaaa.c.................hhhh.c
> beta		bbbb.c....eeee.c...ffff.c....
> omega		cccc.c..dddd.c.......gggg.c..

Yes, that's what I meant.  You can imagine perhaps showing
progressively more detail in each block as the window is stretched
vertically: filename, client user at host, bytes, time, etc.  Or perhaps
show that in a tooltip for each block.

I think something like this would give a good sense of how hard each
machine is working; how fast they are and what their % load factor
is.  It would also satisfy the public desire for more interesting
screenshots. :-)

I am not adverse to making the client write out more information
(within reason) but it seems like a first cut at this could be done
just using information in the existing mon.h interface.  The monitor
can notice when new jobs start, etc.

It might also be good to show blocks with say a red border when the
compile failed, and red hatching when the network transmission
failed.  You could highlight the host name for hosts marked for
backoff. 

Or perhaps we can think of a better layout.

The EtherApe display is also interesting, but in the end I think the
horizontal chart is more useful.

  http://etherape.sourceforge.net/images/v0.6.9.png

-- 
Martin