I'm about to work on something similar but simpler.
Sounds like we can both work on it without stepping on each other too badly.
For starters, I was simply going to have distccd drop incoming connections if the load average was over a threshold. That would achieve my limited goal of avoiding killing workstations that were busy doing other things (as the client would blacklist the busy workstation for a minute).
We're running into issues at my company, possibly related to large numbers of users relative to available CPU slots and the one-second backoff timer.
I think I also need to have the client randomize the host list on startup.
Yes, without a doubt.
I don't think blasting all N servers with a UDP packet on each distcc run is a good idea.
It depends on the size of your preprocessed file. The one preprocessed file that I looked at from our build was 1.5 megabytes; compared to a thousand TCP packets, plus acks, plus setup and teardown, plus sending back the object file, a few tens of UDP packets is not a big deal.
Ideally we'd have a proxy server or a hardware loadbalancer, but I don't think we have the budget or the network engineering resources for that to happen.
And all my servers are identical speed, and probably all running just one job, so they're all either busy or not; no connection counts or weights to care about.
You'd just run your distcc without load management in that case.
-jake
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