[gentoo-user] need help tuning distcc

[John Blinka]

Hi, all,

I run Gentoo on a very old 150 mhz pentium laptop.  As you can imagine,
it's painful to update Gentoo packages on it.  I've been attempting
to use distcc and crossdev so that the more more modern i686 machines on my
local network can do most of the compiling for this i586 box.  However,
I haven't been very successful in offloading its compilations to the faster
boxes: distcc still seems to want to do most of the compiling on the
slow box
and only occasionally sends a compilation to one of the faster boxes.

My reading of the docs suggests that the /etc/distcc/hosts file controls how
the work is distributed and MAKEOPTS in /etc/host controls how much
parallelism
is attempted.  My setup on the slow box is MAKEOPTS="-j5" with
/etc/distcc/hosts
containing a line like

fast_box_1/2 fast_box_2/2 localhost/1

My intention is that make will attempt 5 way parallelism, and that
distcc will
parcel out the 1st two tasks to fast_box_1, the next 2 tasks to fast_box_2,
and the last task to localhost, the slow box.

But, as I watch compilations progress on all 3 machines, I see most of
the work
being done, on the slow box - typically 2 or 3 compilations
simultaneously, and
only an occasional compilation on the faster machines.

How do I convince distcc on the slow machine to send more work - all of
it if
possible - to the fast machines?

Thanks for your help.

John Blinka
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