Distributed compile of Firefox
Posted by Pepijn Oomen
It turns out rolling your own Firefox (and/or Thunderbird) really isn't that complicated, once you have the prerequisites in place. The biggest challenge is in creating your mozconfig, especially if you want an optimized universal build that can be run on both G5 and Mactel machines. Since I am always in for the extra challenge I also used distributed compiling, using distcc.
The results of using distributed compiling were not earth-shocking, but it did make a difference:
w/o distcc
real 77m21.520s
user 94m42.019s
sys 18m53.578s
with distcc
real 57m8.190s
user 13m43.921s
sys 12m29.168s
Compiles were done on a PowerMac G5 dual 2GHz (Geekbench: 1745) and a MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz (Geekbench: 2822), with the PowerMac running the build script and the MacBook assisting in compilation in the distcc compile.
