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

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Thanks to all who replied for your suggestions and info! After
experimenting with various combinations of settings it seems to be
working now. I think I was too aggressive with the number of parallel
make jobs, the laptop just couldn't coordinate that many. I also
stopped distccd on the laptop, in case it was picking up jobs
unintentionally.

Here's the results, a real-life test with ImageMagick 6.7.1.0. The
machines were idle, files were already downloaded, and I don't use
ccache, so it should be actual compile time comparison only:

Normal emerge on laptop, no parallel jobs in MAKEOPTS, no distcc:
merge time: 8 minutes and 27 seconds.

With -j3 in MAKEOPTS, using distcc:
merge time: 4 minutes and 40 seconds.

Great!

Of course, on the desktop it only takes 1 minutes 17 seconds, but an
almost 50% reduction in emerge time on the laptop is still great to
see.