Re: [gentoo-user] Hoping someone can help explain distcc to me

[Peter Humphrey <peter@humphrey.ukfsn.org>]

On Saturday 20 August 2011 23:56:08 Paul Hartman wrote:

> I have a fast desktop computer and a slow laptop. Both are ~amd64
> Gentoo. After some of the recent discussions about Gentoo on slow
> devices, I thought I'd dust off the laptop and try to bring it up to
> date.
> 
> I'd like to use distcc to make the desktop do all the compiling during
> emerges. I've never been able to get distcc working properly, or, at
> least, I've never been able to get it working to the point where using
> distcc is any faster than not using it at all.

Your laptop isn't sending its compilation jobs to your desktop. Have you 
used gkrellm or similar to check for network traffic?

I think I'd take a different approach, one that I dare say you can 
anticipate. By all means take the advice you're about to be offered to get 
distcc working, but why not create a chroot on your desktop, NFS export the 
packages directory from the laptop to it and do the whole job there? Then 
return to the laptop and emerge -k. It does need more keystrokes but it uses 
far less CPU. You just need to copy /var/lib/portage/world, make.conf and 
the /etc/portage tree to the chroot before you start.

I did once get distcc working, but as Neil has observed re Atoms, a lot of 
work is still done before compilation is farmed out to the distcc server, 
rather diluting the benefit of distributed compilation.

-- 
Rgds
Peter		Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23