[distcc] Job count issue

[Jean Delvare]

> On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 05:12:52PM +0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > 3* Any idea what the problem could be? How would I investigate?
> 
> My guess would be that interrupting the compile caused distcc to mark
> one or more hosts as unresponsive, which causes distcc to temporarily
> ignore the host.  Do you see any log messages about a host being in a
> "backoff period"?  I think a file will end with the string "backoff"
> in the "lock" subdir of the .distcc tmpdir when this happens (though
> the comment at the start of timefile.c says that it uses the state
> dir, it appears to me that the code disagrees with this).

Interesting guess but it doesn't quite match what I observe. Just
rebooted both systems, deleted any temporary file in ~/.distcc/*,
checked that nothing was left in /tmp, ran "make clean" then "make
CC=distcc -j4" in the linux-2.6.8-rc2 directory. I got only 3 jobs.

So it can happen without a previous compilation having been interrupted.
I then interrupted that build, and restarted it... 4 jobs this time.
Interrupted, restarted, 1 job only. No stale file anywhere as far as I
can see. Also note that the missing jobs are not per-host. When I get 3
jobs, one of them is running on the remote server, which is supposed to
get the missing 4th job. And for confirmation I don't see any "backoff"
file.

If it was a distcc problem I would expect the misisng job(s) to come
back after some time, but they never do. Instead, they come back when a
new build starts. This is what makes me think that this is really "make"
incorrectly defining the number of jobs as it starts. But then I don't
get why using distcc seems to trigger the bug.

Thanks for the pointer anyway. What I find really strange is that this
happens only when I run Linux 2.6 and only when I compile Linux 2.6. I
cannot see how this is supposed to matter, but still it seems to do.

I believe that my best chance now would be if someone else would succeed
in triggering the same problem. If nothing else it would demonstrate
that I am not crazy ;)

Thanks again,

-- 
Jean "Khali" Delvare
http://khali.linux-fr.org/