I've just tried distcc and its wonderful! I haven't benchmarked it yet, but subjectively (from watching the nodes' load-avr) distcc seems to give *much* more even loading that just running OpenMOSIX. If anyone has more than one machine at their disposal, I'd strongly recommend investigating distcc.
On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Martin Pool wrote:
I haven't tried it myself but I would have expected the short, intense jobs generated by compilation to be a problem [for OpenMOSIX]
Yes, I agree. But, I think OM still has a role to play. Running OM underneath distcc should help improve the mean performance (in a heterogeneous cluster). Whenever a faster node is unloaded whilst a slower node is busy compiling (and this situation lasts for any length of time) OM should migrate that process to the faster node, speeding up compilation. That might occur just before linking, for example.
I guess the improvement will depend strongly on the composition of the cluster and the code you're compiling. The improvement (from running OM) might be marginal in certain cases, but I don't think it would make things worse.
Hmmm, time for some more experiments.
---- Paul Millar