Recompiling (building) hundreds of source files totaling, say, 5 MB, can take a dozen hours. It's a productivity killer that programmers perform as infrequently as possible. Reducing this compile time could let developers see the results of their changes daily instead of weekly.
The
new NetBuild feature
in Symantec C++ 7 lets you distribute compilation chores across the network to computers that are less busy than yours. Compiles formerly done serially on one machine are now happening in parallel on several machines. This potentially speeds up some compiles by a minimum of 100 percent (assuming you're using at least five 90-MHz Pentium PCs).
Before starting
NetBuild, you must go to each candidate machine on the network and install a small control program. Whenever you run NetBuild, the administrative routine on your local PC checks the dependencies of your project file to determine which source files need to be compiled. Then, the first file is fed to the local compiler. The administrator looks for any machines that are free. When it finds one, it passes the remote machine the full path of the file to be compiled. The remote machine then logs on to your local machine, mounts one of its drives for accessing the particular file, and begins the compilation.
You can be even more efficient on large projects by designating one computer to be a build server. This server would contain precompiled headers (the Windows system files and other commonly accessed housekeeping code) that otherwise would be compiled for each source file.
NetBuild won't always be faster than a single-machine build. On projects of roughly 25 or fewer source files, you're just as well
off going the traditional route, Symantec says.
NetBuild does little to analyze the resources on each networked computer. It can, however, redistribute work on the fly if a node goes down. Symantec plans to add intelligent scheduling and resource "sniffing" in later versions.
screen_link (42 Kbytes)
NetBuild distributes source files to other machines for faster, parallel compiling.
Distributed Compiling Speeds Development
