Re: [gentoo-user] emerging with distcc: What's taking so long?

[Frank Steinmetzger]

On Mon, Jan 04, 2016 at 04:38:56PM -0600, Dale wrote:

> >>> what's taking so long when emerging packages despite distcc is used?
> >>> […]
> >>> Some compilations are being run on the remote machine, so distcc does
> >>> work.  The log file on the remote machine shows compilation times of a
> >>> few milliseconds up to about 1.5 seconds at most.  The distcc server
> >>> would be finished with the emerging within maybe 15 minutes, and the
> >>> client takes several hours already.
> >>>
> >>> Is there something going wrong?  Is there a way to speed things up as
> >>> much as I would expect from using distcc?
> > […]
> > Can it be that the client is simply too slow compared to the server to
> > give it any significant load?  (The client isn't exactly slow; it's slow
> > compared to the server.)
>
> Once a really long time ago I tried doing this sort of thing.  What I
> found is that the network speed between the two systems was what was
> slowing it down.  It just couldn't transfer the data back and forth fast
> enough.  I had a network card that really didn't have any good drivers
> for it.  Anyway, it may not be your problem but it may be worth looking
> at to be sure.  Using iftop or some similar tool should tell you
> something.

Well I’m using distcc over WiFi which gives me shy of 2 MB per second (only
the big PC which acts as server is connected to the router via cable). For
such cases I recommend using compression. It definitely increased throughput.

What I observe on my setup, though, is that sometimes a package builds with
distcc, and then all of a sudden I get (the meaning of) “distributing via
distcc failed, building locally” and after a while it works again. No idea
what’s going on there.

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