[distcc] compression question

[Brian Hall]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 06:53:15AM +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> On 15 Feb 2005, Brian Hall <brihall at pcisys.net> wrote:
> > I am using two AMD64 Gentoo based PCs, a server with dual 1.8G Opterons 
> > and a client/workstation with a 2.0G S754 A64. The server has GBe, and 
> > so does the client, but I've recently discovered that the r8169 driver 
> > gives me NFS timeouts on high traffic (large NFS transfers), so I've 
> > dropped back to using a Intel PCI 100MB card (e100).
> > 
> > My question is, given the above relatively fast hardware, is it worth it 
> > to enable lzo compression? I believe the A64 chips will compress very 
> > quickly. I am just looking to minimize the compilation slowdown caused 
> > by going from a GB connection for distcc to 100MB.
> > 
> > My current config, with MAKEOPTS=-j6 in /etc/make.conf:
> > 
> > # distcc-config --get-hosts
> > zippy/4 localhost/2
> > 
> > Proposed config, if it is likely to be faster:
> > zippy/4,lzo localhost/2
> 
> It's probably pretty close; using compression might be faster.  Could
> you please time a kernel build with each setup and let us know?

Well, I tried; but it seems I found a problem with using lzo on AMD64.
Always fails at this point, with any "-jX". I tried X of 1,2,4 and 6.

# distcc-config --get-hosts
zippy/4,lzo localhost/2

on 2.6.10-ck5:

make clean; time make "CC=distcc" -j1 bzImage
  AS      arch/x86_64/ia32/vsyscall-sysenter.o
  SYSCALL arch/x86_64/ia32/vsyscall-sysenter.so
  AS      arch/x86_64/ia32/vsyscall-syscall.o
  SYSCALL arch/x86_64/ia32/vsyscall-syscall.so
  CC      arch/x86_64/ia32/syscall32.o
{standard input}: Assembler messages:
{standard input}:5: Error: file not found:
arch/x86_64/ia32/vsyscall-syscall.so
{standard input}:8: Error: file not found:
arch/x86_64/ia32/vsyscall-sysenter.so
distcc[14895] ERROR: compile arch/x86_64/ia32/syscall32.c on zippy/4,lzo
failed
make[1]: *** [arch/x86_64/ia32/syscall32.o] Error 1
make: *** [arch/x86_64/ia32] Error 2

real    0m22.550s
user    0m6.688s
sys     0m1.925s


Works fine without lzo.
# distcc-config --get-hosts
zippy/4 localhost/2

on 2.6.10-ck5:
make clean; time make "CC=distcc" -j2 bzImage
real    1m59.061s
user    1m38.722s
sys     0m19.565s
real    1m58.562s
user    1m38.162s
sys     0m19.650s
real    1m56.853s
user    1m36.714s
sys     0m19.411s
make clean; time make "CC=distcc" -j6 bzImage
real    1m24.610s
user    1m6.104s
sys     0m17.882s