[distcc] Re: keeping localhost busy

[Jeff]

Martin Pool wrote:
> The distcc scheduler could probably do better here: at the moment,
> with n hosts and n jobs it will usually run one on each.  Assume all
> of them have one CPU, and the first machine is four times faster than
> the last.  It would probably be better to run two tasks on the fast
> machine, and none on the last.  

I think that's a good idea, but slow machines are only really a problem at the 
very end of a build. What if there were a tag that could be applied to the 
slowest machines in the host file so that those hosts were only used if the 
percentage of jobs completed was less than a certain number? For instance, my 
farm is made up of pentium 1's, 2's and 3's. If I could tag all the pentium 1's 
as "50%" to make sure they are only assigned jobs when the build is less than 
halfway done I think it might alleviate this problem. Does anyone else think 
this might be useful, or is it too simplistic a solution?


-- Jeff