[distcc] avoiding work

[Martin Pool]

On 29 Jan 2004, Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu.edu> wrote:

> Not that Cygwin is the primary platform, or even close to it, but fork 
> costs a fortune on Cygwin.  configure scripts that run in 10 seconds on 
> an old Linux box take 15 minutes or more to run under Cygwin, primarily 
> due to the slowness of emulating fork correctly.

Ouch!

I'm really happy to support Cygwin and try to make it go faster, but I
don't think think it makes sense to rework major design decisions
because of Cygwin's cost model.  

I think it would be a much better use of time to try to avoid fork()
on Cygwin.  This can probably be done.  Does it expose a spawn() call,
or is vfork() cheaper than fork()?  Using either of these might well
make distcc a lot faster without needing global changes.  Somebody
said they were working on this but I never heard back.

Useful and venerable though autoconf is, it's performance is pretty
terrible even on unix.  One of the distcc benchmarks is GNU hello,
which takes about 15s to configure and 1s to compile.  

-- 
Martin 
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