[distcc] distcc on Cygwin w/o fork()

Laine Stump laine+distcc at laine.org
Mon Apr 3 19:54:52 GMT 2006


Awhile back I corresponded with someone on this list who said they 
had patched distcc for Cygwin to eliminate the use of fork(). I've 
been unsuccessful at contacting him again, though, so I thought I'd 
ask: Has anyone else done this, and have the patches (or better yet, 
a binary) available? (Or alternately, if someone has built distcc for 
a windows host using mingw, or even native MSVC - anything to 
eliminate the horribly slow fork() emulation on Cygwin).

I ask because my experience with the cygwin-built distcc binary is 
that although I got it up and running with little trouble, it gives 
me little real gain - 3 machines together (build running on Windows, 
plus one Windows drone and one NetBSD drone) provided only about a 5% 
improvement over the Windows machine alone. (Yes, I did check to make 
sure the compile jobs were being farmed out to the other machines). 
(and unnfortunately, I'm stuck hosting my builds on Windows because 
of other tools used in the build process).



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