[distcc] distcc scalability with # of users?

[Dan Kegel]

I'm interested in using distcc in a group of 16 programmers
where all 16 workstations are equally fast, all 16
workstations are both compile servers and compile clients,
and all access a shared copy of distcc over NFS or SMB.
Several potential problems come to mind when thinking about this:

1. Since the list of hosts read from $prefix/etc/distcc/hosts is
the same for all workstations, every workstation will
issue large compile jobs to itself sometimes even though it'd be better
off only handling preprocessing and linking (right?)

2. Distcc won't currently check the load average of each compile server,
so workstations busy with non-distcc jobs will get slammed with
distcc jobs, negatively impacting normal use of the workstations.

3. If more than one user is issuing distcc jobs, their distcc's
will sometimes issue jobs to the same machine by chance
(fairly often, if distcc assigns jobs in order of the etc/distcc/hosts file).

Has anyone looked at these issues?   I suppose a first step I
might take if nobody else has might be to run a few benchmarks
to see if these potential problems actually happen in the real world.

Thanks,
Dan

-- 
My technical stuff: http://kegel.com
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