[distcc] Greetings

[Jean Delvare]

Hi all,

I just subscribed to the list and thought I would introduce myself and
report my success with distcc.

Two weeks ago, a colleague of mine asked me if I knew distcc, and whether
I thought we could use it to speed up compilation of our large projects.
I had of course heard of it, and knew that my GNU/Linux distribution
even shipped with a package of it, but had never actually given it a try.

As a developer working on the Linux kernel and other open-source projects
written in C, I happen to use gcc quite frequently. I don't have a
recent and powerful computer, but instead have 3 older machines. And my
girlfriend does have a recent, faster machine. Total computation power
would exceed 8000 bogomips. So I thought the time had come for me to
give a try to distcc.

Learning how to get it to work was really quick and easy. Of course, I
did a few beginner's mistakes (trying to monitor the jobs from a
different account, or forgetting the -j parameter to make and blaming
distcc for not distributing the workload) but now that I'm used to it,
it's working just fine and easy. I even compiled 2.16 from the sources
to have a (gtk-only) distccmon-gnome, which is quite a nice tool to have.

Want figures? Typical kernel compilation time dropped from 15 minutes to
6 minutes. I definitely appreciate that.

I found that including the significantly slowest machine into the farm
would not help, and would even make things slower, because the linker
would always have to wait for it while all other systems are done with
their respective jobs. So I am using the three faster machines for
optimal results.

So I really have to thank Martin and all the contributors to the distcc
project for coming up with such an helpful tool :)

With your permission, I'll lurk here for some times while using distcc.
I noticed some strange behaviors from times to times, but will keep
quiet until I have isolated the problems, if they do exist. I'll try to
help if I can, but you may know how busy my other projects are keeping
me, so I wouldn't promise anything.

Thanks,
Jean Delvare