[Adium-devl] Hardware plans

[Graham Booker]

On Aug 23, 2007, at 5:12 AM, Evan Schoenberg wrote:

>
> On Aug 22, 2007, at 11:57 PM, Peter Hosey wrote:
>
>> The questions, then, are:
>>
>> 1. Could distcc on a cluster of minis make up the loss of clock  
>> cycles with pure parallelism, being able to compile 12 source  
>> files at a time rather than four?
>>
>> (Keeping in mind, of course, that it will take some fraction of a  
>> second longer for each compiler process to finish, and that that  
>> fraction must currently be multiplied by 608—this being the sum of  
>> 500, which is the number of .m files in the Adium project, and  
>> 108, which is the number of .m files in the AIUtilities project.)
>>
>> 2. Would 2 GiB of RAM be enough for each distributed-build node?
>

I can compare 2.5G of RAM to 1G of RAM (two computers with very  
similar processor speeds), and there is a major speedup with  
successive complies, but even with 2.5G of RAM, it is continually  
accessing the disk (reads) during clean builds (which we would likely  
want to use).

> I don't know the answers (though my experiences with distcc have  
> never left me particularly impressed) but add two more questions:
> 3. For purposes other than building, is having multiple computers  
> more or less useful than having a single, powerful one?
> 4. Is managing multiple systems worth the added management burden  
> versus a single system?
>

My experience with distcc is that the overhead really hurts unless  
you have many many computers.  Case in point: I used to have a 500MHz  
G4 laptop, and a dual processor G5.  When compiling from the laptop,  
I would have it use distcc for builds, but the end result is that it  
was *slower* than just having the laptop do the build.  The reason:  
Much of the build process was disk limited, and in this case, the  
disk used was the laptop drive.

5. What is the effect of the hard disk speed.
The hard disks are very slow in the minis, but they are significantly  
faster in the Xserves.

5.a What is the speed comparison if the mini's HDs were swapped out  
with faster drives
5.b What if a fast external FW disk is used

6. What is the effect of the bus architecture and RAM speed between  
the minis and the Xserves.
7. What is the speed difference between Core 2 Duos and dual core  
Xenons.

> -Evan

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