Implementation and Analysis of Win32 Native Distributed Compilation System - WinDistcc

Many software vendors are suffering from heavy compilation overload because the size of their software prod- uct is getting bigger and bigger. One of the promising so- lutions to reduce the compilation time is to use a distributed compiler. It allows us to compile multiple files on several ma- chines concurrently. However most of distributed compilers can't deliver ideal performance due to many undesired over- heads such as communication overhead, lack of resources, load imbalance, file dependence, and so on. In order to study the detailed performance matrices, we developed the Win32 prototype of a distributed compiler based on distcc (GNU distributed compiler) (1), (2), called WinDistcc. WinDistcc contains additional features based on distcc's basic functions. The compiler supports two kinds of compilation modes: a lo- cal preprocessing or a remote preprocessing. We measured the performances in both cases and identify reasons of per- formance degradation in normal distributed compilers. Based on the performance study, we could understand the design re- quirement for ideal distributed compilers.