Re: [gentoo-user] Reproducible Installation Lists?

[Michael]

On Saturday, 26 February 2022 22:47:52 GMT Ramces Tampo-og Red wrote:

> Yeah, I was just thinking about that since building a powerful, new
> computer around my area is prohibitively expensive. But getting old,
> prebuilt computers is ludicrously cheap. I figured that I can get a few
> of them for $50-75 and just plug them to an ethernet switch to do the
> compiling for me.

Distributed compiling may not be as useful as you think.  Not all phases of a 
build can be distributed, pre-processing and linking will still take a lot of 
time, some packages will not compile over distcc and will fail, any gains in 
compiling time could be eaten away by network losses, etc.  On the other hand 
a 'better' PC with more RAM and a faster CPU with more cores could prove 
transformative in its performance impact, when used as a building server for 
binary packages to be installed thereafter on slower systems.

I have found older PCs with limited resources eventually reach an EOL as far 
as their capability to emerge large packages.  I have a very old Core 2 Duo 
Pentium laptop with 4G RAM, which even with MAKEOPTS="-j1" takes forever to 
build qtwebengine:

genlop -t dev-qt/qtwebengine

     Fri Feb  4 20:06:46 2022 >>> dev-qt/qtwebengine-5.15.2_p20211216
       merge time: 1 day, 3 hours, 12 minutes and 7 seconds.

Chromium got so slow over the years, I stopped emerging it long ago.

Give distcc a go if you have a spare PC to experiment and want to test % 
improvements with your setup, but personally I wouldn't invest money on it.  
Instead I'd save up for a faster machine.  YMMV.