On Saturday 30 September 2006 01:15, Maxence Dunnewind wrote: > i would do a "packaging farm" because i know some people who packages some > big app, and the building time is about 20 hours :/ > So, do you think there really is no solution for parrallel works over > Internet ? > (Maybe just with some computer with a big connection over Internet ...)
For the most part, compiling is about having really small files be processed really quickly. Doing it in parallel would mean having many identically configured machines (same compiler, same libraries, etc.). This might be hard to coordinate if the machines are not maintained by the same administrator. Not to mention, the latency of sending a file to another machine to be compiled or sending prerequisite files for linking would probably overweigh the benefit of the parallel compile. If you had extremely low latency and identically configured servers, you might see some benefit. However, I would have to question the utility of something like that when I look at the Debian buildd system, I see that the ETA for all packages on all architectures page ([1]) shows very low numbers for all major architectures. The only architectures that are over 10 hours out are armeb and m68k. M68k is not very important these days, and armeb seems to be an embedded architecture. I don't think either of those are release architectures for etch. For the other architectures, I don't think it's uncommon to have buildds turned off at times and not build. The Debian buildds are not based on a beowulf style setup and don't do parallel compiles to my knowledge. Each build daemon builds one whole package and moves on to the next IIRC. All of these factors lead me to believe that parallel builds are not required to keep up with the flow of even massive bodies of software, like the archive that makes up Debian, for instance. According to the Debian home page, Debian contains 15490 binary packages. [1] http://www.buildd.net/cgi/all_ETA.cgi Ciao, wt -- Warren Turkal, Research Associate III/Systems Administrator Colorado State University, Dept. of Atmospheric Science _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
