distcc: worth my time?

[ub3rg00b3r]

Hey, I have tons... and I mean TONS, of old computers... Pentium I's II's and Pro's that normally I would have no use for.... would it make sense to make a distcc cluster or some other form of parallel computing with them? for anything.... just so I can use them... thanks for your input.

[peter_poulsen]

Well, I have two computers in my distcc family (a 3GHz P4 and a 1.3GHz TBird), and _really_ helps on the compile times. However, if have one fast computer and several slow ones it might, in some cases, actually turn out be slower.

Now, I don't know exactly what computers it is that you have, but I would probably get the three largest together and use those. Try as often as possible to initiale the compiling from the largest computer, as linking, the last part of building a program, is always done on that computer.

Good luck

[acasto]

Yes, distcc is great. I would probably just go with a handful of the faster ones though. As tossing a slow one in the mix with other faster ones may hold up things as the others will be finished with their jobs and waiting on the slow one to return what it was working on. For day-to-day use, and the amount of compiling you do with Gentoo, distcc is proabably the best thing to do with multiple systems. I set up both a distcc group and an open mosix cluster with some PIIs, and the distcc functioned flawlessly and sped things up, where the mosix just kept crashing as it's not made for compiling, but more of a multithreaded number crunching type scenario. I now have four servers around 800MHz a piece set up running distcc between them all. It makes updating a breeze and make it easier on system under load because I can set the nice values, and distripute the load to systems that's not being used much.

What I've done in a similar situation, so I wouldn't need a hard drive in every machine. Is just to create a base install in a chrooted folder. Then set the folder up as an NFS export. The boot up some systems with an NFS capable livecd, and mount the NFS export and run distcc. This way you have a syncronized and easily maintainable system with the same versions of distcc and gcc. Plus it makes an easy way to convert some of the newer higher end workstations (running windows) in the office at night into part of the distcc group.

As for speed improvments. With on Athlon 2000, one P4 1.8GHz, and two PII 350MHz running distcc, I was able to recompile a base system (for another system in chrooted) in under an hour.




- Adam
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