Tuning Teambuilder

Tuning Teambuilder

Once Teambuilder is installed, all the machines on the compiler farm will benefit from the speed improvements it brings. There are some situations where it is possible to make adjustments to your comilation, or to Teambuilder's settings to achieve even greater performance enhancements. These potential improvements are discussed below.

Daemons

Try to match MaxJobs to the number of processors in your machines. For a single processor machine set MaxJobs to 1, for a two processor machine a MaxJobs of 2 (possibly 3) is sensible.
Put the scheduler on a highly responsive machine. In particular running the scheduler on a machine that is also initiating builds is suboptimal.
If you have the option, purchase at least one very fast dedicated computer for compiling. Since the fastest machine gets jobs first, if you are just compiling one file (which is common) it will always be compiled by the fast machine so even small builds will benefit from a speed increase. This machine would also be a good candidate for the scheduler.

Compilers

Try setting the -j parameter to make to be higher than the total available jobs. This will ensure that there are always jobs queued up for compilation. Queued jobs are also assigned to daemons based on job size and daemon speed.
Set TEAMBUILDER_COMPRESS=1. This reduces the size of the files being transferred at the expense of some processing. Even on a 100Mb/s network this will speed up compilation with modest CPUs. On a 10Mb/s network this is essential.
If your build process runs commands other than the compiler and the -j parameter to make is causing many of these jobs to be started, make links from the command to tbcompiler and use the Teambuilder version instead. This will cause these commands to be scheduled and keep the load of the machine acceptable.

Trademarks

Teambuilder version 1.0