distcc - distributed compiling

[ghoti]

Anyone ever try, or heard of distcc for *nix users?

http://distcc.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/web/index.html

I've been meaning to tinker with it (I have 4-5 computers in my lan for various uses that don't get used much) and have just been too lazy

I figure MaNGOS and SD2 are good candidates for such a thing, as would wine, and the kernel (if you are into that sorta masochism, heh) - each takes a while on even somewhat beefy machines and could make testing compilation bugs easier/faster in the long run, no?

I always look for new shiny toys.

[freghar]

I used distcc about 4 years ago on Gentoo, it was pretty good, with a nice tool to display status of each compiling node (+ clusterssh running dstat on each machine), but it wasn't that reliable. I tried compiling a Linux kernel this way and it was unusable (failed to load modules), compiling some stupid program (IIRC it was proftpd) with -j5 on a single one-core machine triggered a kernel oops several times, etc.

So ... it's a nice toy, together with ccache, but it isn't as reliable as I would like to.

[kerbe]

distcc is good when you have got it setuped nicely and things work. I have tried it few times, but not been developing such big softwares that it would make real difference, and having mixed 32bit and 64bit comps make things sometimes hard..

For mangos I'm not sure if that work. In my experience if I try compile mangos with -j5 for example, it will fail. I think I have got compile failing even with -j2.. so I run my compiles only without any -j. I however use ccache, and that makes quite big difference and compensates.