« October 2005 | Main | January 2006 »
November 17, 2005
Xcode 2.2 = distcc love
Ever since Xcode incorporated distributed builds using distcc (a year ago? two?), I've been having this fantasy. It's the one where I sit downstairs in the comfy chair, working away on my (now aging) TiBook, while other computers on the network, oh, say, the Dual G5 upstairs in the office, grind away on all the code I'm writing downstairs while sipping tea and watching The Newshour.
For whatever reason, and even after extensive firewall futzing and other things, I could just never get the distcc processes to talk across machines. At least not in any scale of time that made farming out the compilation worthwhile.
To my joy, whatever changed with distcc in the latest Xcode 2.2 (not developer preview) fixed all the problems. It just works. (And things did change: the interface in Xcode preferences is quite different.) The machines see each other over Bonjour and the right things happen when compiling.*
Now for the payoff: a full compile of Sandvox, not including WebKit, takes roughly 315 seconds on the TiBook, standalone. That same compile, farming the jobs out to the G5 upstairs, takes about 220 seconds, for a savings of over 30%! Plus, rather than having the CPU pegged at 100% during compilation, with the TiBook's fan going crazy, the load now bounces between 4 and 60%, making the TiBook quite useable for other things while Xcode is building.
Now, how do we get distcc happening down at Peet's?
(Thank you, Apple.)
*Another big issue affecting this is network latency. The other half of the equation, of course, was swapping out the TiBook's Airport card for an 802.11g PCcard and switching my home network to 802.11g exclusively. I had already done this before WWDC for other reasons.
Posted by ttalbot at 12:13 PM | Comments (1)
November 15, 2005
Bounties for WebKit fixes
A Proposal for WebKit Programmers, belidat.
Posted by ttalbot at 5:54 PM
November 9, 2005
CocoaHeads LA Meeting Tomorrow Night
Just a reminder that the second monthly meeting of CocoaHeads LA (Santa Monica) will be tommorow (Thursday) night at 7:00 PM.
We'll again be hosted by Steve Gehrman at the fabulous CocoaTech offices. We may move the venue later in the evening to one of the local spots for food, drinks, or dessert. Mmmm.... Cocoa and dessert! Sounds like a good, new LA trend.
We're still in our nascent stages, so now's the perfect time to join the group. (It's free).
We'll be having our general Cocoa roundtable, show-and-tell, and discussion/hacking on our first community effort: CocoaSpot. (What's CocoaSpot? Come to the meeting and find out!)
CocoaHeads LA. See you there!
Update: Steve says that the care package is in from Mark Dalrymple at CocoaHeads HQ. Included is a brand spanking new copy of his and Aaron Hillegass's new book Advanced Mac OS X Programming. We'll have it available for your perusal and possibly as a door-prize. I can't wait to see it!
Posted by ttalbot at 3:34 PM