[distcc] Web based compiling farm

[Christian Leber]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 10:23:59AM +0200, Antenore Gatta wrote:

> My goal is to create a distributed system for compiling software on
> demand for not experienced users.

There are distributions that you can download or buy and they will just
work for the not experienced users.

> In the first stage I'd like to have a web based form where the user
> can choose from a software list and between some different platforms
> (amd, intel, sparc, arm, ..., etc.) after N minutes user should be
> able to download a tar archive with the platform optimized compiled
> version.

Before wasting your time and resources you should evalute how big the
possible improvement in speed is at all.
And the number of packages that _could_ make any use of a possible
improvement in speed is also small.
And how about "support" of all the binaries with minor differences on
different systems?

> I tried with ICMP and anycast but both doesn't pass trough every routers.
> We have obtained some result sending a little image (png) via ssh
> counting the seconds, b ut sometimes the routing change unexpectedly.
> Perhaps using the same distcc socket the routing should be the same
> (except for router/backbone problems).

One of the ideas of TCP/IP is actually that you don't have to do the routing
yourself.

I don't know what you are about, but when the connections of the nodes
are so slow/bogus that you experience "routing changes" while
transfering "a little image (png)" you can forget everything.

Did you at least measure the amount of data that is transfered when
compiling some Package?



> Please do you have an idea about this?

Yes, please don't waste your time and don't terrorize the world with
defunct binaries.


When you like compiling and optimizing stuff you could try to increase
the amount of parallelisation that can be used in some packages when
compiling them.


Christian Leber

-- 
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