[distcc] load management

[mbp at sourcefrog.net]

On 29 Apr 2004, Daniel Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:

> Here's a scheme that does what you're suggesting in a slightly different 
> way.
> 
> I've been toying with the following idea, which combines load balancing
> with fsh-like connection caching.  Let's call it lbfsh.

I think that would be pretty handy, even if we end up improving
the built in balancer.  In particular it would let people shift
any old task onto a remote machine, which is a frequently
requested feature for distcc.  

So it means just "run this somewhere, I don't care where", kind
of like some cluster tools.

> One scenario would be: running "lbfshd $SHELL" would start a
> local server listening on a local-only socket, put that
> socket's url in the environment as LBFSH_URL, and run a shell;
> when the shell exited, the local server would exit.  The
> command "lbfsh host cmd ..." would ignore the host argument,
> connect to $LBFSH_URL, then execute cmd ... by passing it to
> the local server rather like fsh does, except that the local
> server would pick the remote server to send it to.  To use this
> with distcc, you'd set DISTCC_RSH to 'lbfsh', and set
> DISTCC_HOSTS to anything at all; lbfsh would ignore the host
> argument.

I think you could make it a bit more automatic.

Hardcode the socket to ~/.lbfsh/socket.  (Well, maybe have an
option to override.)  If the client finds there's no daemon
listening, it forks one.

The daemon could die of boredom after say 5 minutes of
inactivity.  (Not that idle processes really matter, but some
people get antsy about them.)

Rather than ignoring the host argument I think you should pass it
through to the daemon, which uses it to select a group of hosts.
If there is exactly one host, then this works like a faster
version of fsh.  You might look up the hosts names either from a
local configuration or a multi-A DNS record or a Rendezvous
group. 

-- 
Martin
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