ElectricAccelerator annotation files contain a gold mine of information about your build, such as the dependencies between jobs in the build, the time required to run each job, the exact command-line and environment used to invoke each command in the build, and even every file read and written by each job in the build. Many [Read More →]

One rookie performance mistake I’ve seen in GNU make makefiles is the use of $(shell) without := assignment. Of course I’m not the first person to write about this, but people are still making this mistake, and it’s so easy to fix, it’s really tragic that it’s still out there. UPDATE: read more about GNU [Read More →]

Are you using the best method for invoking submakes in a recursive make based build? A simple change can turn on the afterburners by unlocking parallelism.

Somebody asked me the other day, “How much does the ElectricAccelerator filesystem cache reduce I/O load on my build host?” This is an interesting question, because in some cases, the impact of Accelerator caching is a big part of the performance benefit. Consider the case of ClearCase dynamic views, which have notoriously bad performance, particularly [Read More →]

In this continuation of the ElectricAccelerator vs. distcc battle royale, I’ll compare the performance of these two tools when building samba, a suite of tools that provide file and print services to Windows clients from Unix-like servers. Samba is a particularly interesting package for this comparison because distcc was originally created in order to accelerate [Read More →]