[distcc] should driving machine be part of the "farm" ?

[Martin Pool]

On Mon 2003-09-15, spipyeah wrote:

> Naturally, compiling on the machine that drives
> compilation has low overhead.
> 
> But, if a large number of machines are part of the
> distcc "farm", I suspect most of the driving machine's
> time would be better spent doing preprocessing &
> feeding only, and as such increase the chances of
> always having something ready to handle to machines
> that finish their distcc compilation jobs.

Yes.
 
> I'm just hoping to collect some opinions on this
> matter. For a large project a for a cluster of about 8
> machines, is it actually better to dedicated the
> driving machine to do preprocessing only? (and so not
> include it in the hosts file).

Probably yes.  It will depend on your source tree, your network, your
compiler, and your makefile (or alternative) just what fraction of the
work must be done locally, which is the most important thing here.  At
about the 3-4 machine level it may be worth putting localhost last; at
8-10 machines it may be better to leave it out altogether.

Why not measure it and report your results?

-- mbp