[distcc] Re: keeping localhost busy

[Martin Pool]

On  1 Oct 2003, Jeff <rustysawdust at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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?

Can you explain how you propose to detect "the end of a build"?   

Make does not tell us when it's approaching the end of the build.  I
don't think Make even "knows" that in any meaningful way.  All Make
does is fire off compiler tasks, so all we can see is how many
compilers are running at the current moment.

-- 
Martin