[distcc] load management

[Justin Randall]

On Tuesday 27 April 2004 06:04 pm, Jake McGuire wrote:
> I am planning to start working on adding load management enhancements
> to distcc for use at our company, but wanted to make sure that no one
> was almost done fixing the problem and also make sure that I didn't
> spend a bunch of time making my changes and have them rejected.
>
> A brief summary of my proposal:
>
...
> 3) on startup, distcc determines appropriate server to send request to
>    a) poll all servers in host list - wait until all respond or 0.1
> seconds, whichever comes first
>    b) multiply connection count by weight, take minimum result, send
> request to that server
...
> Thoughts?  I'll probably get to this next week or maybe later this week.
>
> -jake

The design may be simplified by choosing a coordinator and not changing distcc 
or distccd. This seems to have been the design philosophy for distcc and 
ccache -- don't complicate distcc or distccd if some other program can get 
the job done as well.

The coordinator can receive pushed load information from clients that 
front/masquerade distcc, much like ccache and distcc themselves can 
masquerade cc. When distcc is invoked by the coordinator client, the desired 
host is specified on the command line as the preferred host, and can fallback 
to localhost if there are network problems.

From reading the website, distcc (and ccache) eschew changes that complicate 
core functionality.