Mailing Lists: Apple Mailing Lists
Image of Mac OS face in stamp
 
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Xc3 Distributed Builds: What's the difference between Dedicated and Workgroup?

On Jan 30, 2008, at 11:41 AM, Fritz Anderson <email@hidden> wrote:

The documentation does not tell me much about the difference between Shared Workgroup and Dedicated Network builds.

Shared Workgroup builds can discover servers through Bonjour, and a server can assign a priority to the build service. The method is said to perform best for 10 or fewer servers. There is a diagram of the build process.

Dedicated Network builds must be made from a manually-entered list of servers. The method is said to work best for 10 servers or more. The extremely brief summary of the process appears not to differ from the explanation of Shared Network builds.

So what's the difference? _Why_ is a Dedicated Network build better suited to large build sets?

It has to do with balancing the network transport costs of sending precompiled headers, etc. against the wins of distributed compilation. With the casual connections offered by Bonjour, SWB has to be stateless and can't cache information on the volunteers. That scales poorly beyond 6 machines or so.

With DNB we can trust that we can cache some files on the volunteers because they're dedicated, and with lower network transport costs we can use more volunteers effectively. Still, it flattens out at 10 to 30 volunteers depending on the nature of your source. Computationally- intensive C++ compiles will scale better than straight C. But there is a point at which your host Mac just will not be able to keep dozens of volunteers busy because of disk and network bottlenecks.

Chris
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Xcode-users mailing list      (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/xcode-users/email@hidden

This email sent to email@hidden
References: 
 >Xc3 Distributed Builds: What's the difference between Dedicated and Workgroup? (From: Fritz Anderson <email@hidden>)



Visit the Apple Store online or at retail locations.
1-800-MY-APPLE

Contact Apple | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2007 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.