How much will distcc speed up bootstraping?

woolsherpahat · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2004 Posts: 347

I'm considerig re-installing my six month old gentoo box since things are just getting out of hand. The things on it's last legs.

It's a 1.4ghz and I was wondering how much a second 1.4Ghz would speed up bootstraping? It took almost 14 hours the first time around, think I could half that?

What if I added another 1.4Ghz and a 700Mhz?

GentooBox · Veteran Joined: 22 Jun 2003 Posts: 1168 Location: Denmark

Well, IF you get Distcc to work, then you will speed up the compile quite a bit acording to others here on this forum.

I only got distcc to work a half year ago, and it increased my compilespeed by 24 % (emerge system), thats not much, but its something, and distcc may be improved since i used it.
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MighMoS · Guru Joined: 24 Apr 2003 Posts: 416 Location: @ ~

distcc will help a lot during bootstrapping, but only for compiling. When glibc has to build its language...stuffs...you're computer is on its own for that. (distcc helped be get my Pentium _1_ up and running in only a day!)

I'd say go for it!

[edit] Arr! GentooBox! You beat me!
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woolsherpahat · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2004 Posts: 347

P1? From a stage three right?

You're crazy... you know that?

MighMoS · Guru Joined: 24 Apr 2003 Posts: 416 Location: @ ~

Stage one baby!

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Red Sparrow · Posted: Sat May 15, 2004 4:32 pm Post subject:

When I got my new PowerBook (G4, 1250 MHz), I installed Gentoo on it and my old iMac (G4, 700 MHz) twice from Stage 1 (once with distcc and onec without) just to get an idea (yeah, I had a lot of time on my hands) of how much distcc actually helped (boy, are you getting tired of these parentheses yet?). Here's my results:

On the iMac:
Bootstrapping without distcc: About 4 hours, including downloading sources.
Bootstrapping with distcc: About 3 hours, including downloading sources.

On the PowerBook:
Bootstrapping without distcc: About 3 hours, including downloading sources.
Bootstrapping with distcc: About 2 hours, 15 minutes, including downloading sources.

In my experience, there was a noticable improvement on the bootstrap process and it also helped out on bigger stuff like XFree, tetex, and Firefox. As always, YMMV.

(- Steve -)

odessit · Posted: Sat May 15, 2004 4:46 pm Post subject:

Sugarat · Guru Joined: 24 Jul 2002 Posts: 348

What is it that determines if a package can be distcc'd ?
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Red Sparrow · Posted: Sat May 15, 2004 5:39 pm Post subject:

Hayl · Posted: Sat May 15, 2004 6:40 pm Post subject:

odessit · Posted: Sat May 15, 2004 8:27 pm Post subject:

everything which is Mozilla based (Firefox for example) changes the -j option to 2 (in the make.conf).
For Distcc to work over multiple machines, the -j option must be 3+

The good part about it is that you can still compile it on the different machine, you can just change the hosts to read the IP of the remote machine only.

rbr28 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Feb 2004 Posts: 126

I just got done compiling firefox using distcc and it did in fact compile across three machines. I watched the progress on the monitor and there were parts that didn't get distributed, but most of it did. I'm re-compiling now without distcc to see what the time difference was.

CarlUman · Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2004 8:01 pm Post subject:

Well, let us know how it went. I'm trying to decide if it will be worth the time to set this up on my network (my AMD 2600+, Intel 1.6GHz, maybe Celeron 566). Of course I have to get a working system on my AMD first then the 1.6GHz server will follow.

rbr28 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Feb 2004 Posts: 126

I can tell you from other things I have compiled using distcc that the improvement is very significant. Many people are just using two machines to compile, but I have used several and it makes a world of difference. On the other hand, I typically use distcc to build stuff for older machines, that would take forever to build big packages. For example, I just got done building a P500 celeron system and it would have taken forever without distcc. I compiled across a Pentium M 1.7 and a P4 2.6GHz machine and it finished in no time. The firefox build that I compiled took 71 minutes distcc'd to a 2.4Ghz P4 (not with DDR memory), and a 3.2GHZ P4 with 1GB of DDR). The host was a 1.2GHz Athlon. I'm not sure how good 71 minutes is, and the number itself isn't a good indication because I had many things running on all three machines, and was using the fastest of them quite a bit. After 100 minutes though I am not even close to finishing the same compile on the 1.2GHz machine, without using distcc. There are so many other factors to consider such as the individual application, the number of jobs sent to each machine, etc., that I can't see how people are offering up generic performance improvements that one can expect. All I can say is that for me, anything that takes more than an hour on the host machine, is definitely worth distcc'ing. On a slow machine, that can mean just about anything, on a fast one, that generally only means X, kde, and a few very large apps.

I'll edit this message and add the final compile time without distcc as soon as it's completed.

bizkit · Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:03 pm Post subject: