My previous look at SCons performance compared SCons and gmake on a variety of build scenarios — full, incremental, and clean. A few people suggested that I try the tips given on the SCons ‘GoFastButton’ wiki page, which are said to significantly improve SCons performance (at the cost of some accuracy, of course). Naturally, I [Read More →]

Here’s the thing about high performance: you can’t just bolt it on at the end. It’s got to be baked in from day one. No doubt those of you who are experienced developers are now invoking the venerable Donald Knuth, who once said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” But look at it [Read More →]

I happened across a blog today that made the claim that accelerating builds by distributing to a cluster of computers is “a dying technology.” Instead, they said, you should take advantage of increasing CPU density to enable increasing levels of parallelism in your builds — a single system with eight or more cores is pretty [Read More →]

ElectricAccelerator vs distcc – samba reloaded In an earlier post I compared the performance of ElectricAcclerator and distcc by building samba using each tool in turn on the same cluster. In that test I found that Accelerator bested distcc at suitably high levels of parallelism, but that distcc narrowly beat Accelerator at lower levels of [Read More →]

Imagine if you discovered your colleagues only work 4 hours a day. You thought everyone was working as hard as you until you started monitoring what they did all day. To your surprise, many of them were idle for hours at a time, just sitting still waiting for someone to give them work. And when [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.

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 →]

Previously we have compared the performance of ElectricAccelerator and distcc when building the Linux 2.6 kernel. In what I hope will be the first of several followups, I will repeat the experiment with different software packages, to determine whether that result was a one-off, or whether ElectricAccelerator really is consistently better performing than distcc. In [Read More →]

There are lots of different parallel, distributed build systems in the world besides ElectricAccelerator. In this post, I’m going to share my recent experience with one popular alternative, GNU make combined with distcc.

I spend most of my time with ElectricAccelerator working on the “big” features — performance, scalability, fault-tolerance. It’s easy to forget that there are a ton of “little” features that can themselves make a big difference in the value of the system. Case in point: the build log. If you have any experience with parallel [Read More →]