Happiness is fast compilation over NFS

Peter Desnoyers (pjd@midnight.com)
Tue, 16 Jul 1996 09:51:18 -0400

After a great deal of disappointment because the nice fast Linux
systems we bought at work (mostly at my urging) compile slower than
diskless sun3s*, I finally sat down and started playing around with the
GNU assembler.

Lo and behold, if you define FILE_OFFSET_IS_CHAR_INDEX at the top of
libbfd.c (or in bfd/Makefile) and recompile, writes get coalesced
properly and compilation over NFS works the way it should.

I just thought there would be other people out on the list who would
appreciate this information...

[*no flames, please. With compiler, source, and target all over NFS -
which is a typical configuration with most modern workstations - Linux
compile performance is awful. The problem is 2-fold - the Linux NFS
client doesn't coalesce small writes into larger ones, and the GNU
assembler + GNU libc interact by default in a way which causes the
assembler to do most of its writing in chunks of 20 to 100 bytes.]

-- 


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