Recently, the pointyhat package building cluster got a new machine to help out with i386 builds. The new machine, installed by Kris Kennaway as gohan18.freebsd.org, sports two sockets populated by quad-core Intel Xeon 5320 chips clocked at 1.86 GHz. Machine have 4 GB of RAM, but it’s promised to get upgraded to 8 GB soon. That’s eight cores in a single chassis, yes. Pretty shiny! The machine was donated by Yahoo!
Existing i386 cluster on pointyhat consists of 18 blades, each fitted with Pentium III at 700 MHz processor and 1 GB of memory. If we assume that the Woodcrest/Clovertown generation of Intel chips is two and a half times as effective as Pentium III on the same clock, this single new machine pretty much doubles the throughput of the i386 cluster.
I have collected build times of 15,935 packages built on the old gohan blades, and put them into the graph. Click for the full size.
I have marked build times of some of the popular ports in the graph. The only conclusion which can be drawn from this graph is that we got way too much p5 module ports. The longest port to successfully build (that rules out OpenOffice) is koffice, which takes 30 hours to complete.
I have compared build times of some random ports on the old gohans and gohan18. On small ports the speedup is up to 8x, perhaps because of much faster hard drives. The typical p5 module went from 12 minutes to a minute and 30 seconds. Larger ports exhibited a more modest speedup in the range of 2x – 3x.
The future of package building is bright!
With the introduction of Gohan18 does this mean that their will be more chance to update via binary ports as oppsoed to compiling from source? I use FreeBSD as a server/desktop and prefer it over PC-BSD, as I run a gnome desktop. But the only problem is the compiling from source for all apps, would be nice to be able to update via binaries.
The builds will finish twice as faster, so there’s some chance the packages will be fresher. But there isn’t a good package-only upgrading tool, like portupgrade, so …