[distcc] Using distcc on two ARM boards resulted in almost no acceleration...

[Martin Pool]

It may be that the client's filesystem bandwidth is the limiting
factor, especially if it's not got much memory and is paging onto a
slow flash disk.  (What kind of storage and how much ram does that
board have?)  You could try tweaking the filesystem mount options or
perhaps building on a tmpfs.

You could try listing the remote server first so distcc will prefer
it.  You could also try adding the ,lzo option for the remote server:
depending on the relative speed of the network device vs cpu sending
less data may help.

I would try running top (showing the wchan) and iotop to get an idea
of where it is spending time.  It may be it doesn't have enough memory
to run that many tasks efficiently.  On the other hand it may just be
idling and giving it more tasks will cover up the latency.

Hope that helps. I'm interested in how it turns out,
-- 
Martin