Is there a way to speed up Macports compiling?

[panzerkiller]

As titled, it is the major reason preventing me use Linux/BSD on old Macs.

 

[ervus]

In our office we used distcc and a stack of Mini G4s. It turned overnight rebuilds into a cup of coffee for us.

 

[barracuda156]

As titled, it is the major reason preventing me use Linux/BSD on old Macs.

With OpenBSD at least you won’t need to compile much, it got prebuilt packages.

BTW, MacPorts doesn’t even compile on OpenBSD, and on Linux it is a non-trivial exercise to use.

On macOS you will have pre-built ports if you use 10.6.8.

 

[barracuda156]

In our office we used distcc and a stack of Mini G4s. It turned overnight rebuilds into a cup of coffee for us.

How many of those you got? I never used distcc, but I assume performance of a given number of MacMinis is inferior to performance of the same number of CPU cores of a single machine. And then they are capped at 1.5 GHz

 

[panzerkiller]

In our office we used distcc and a stack of Mini G4s. It turned overnight rebuilds into a cup of coffee for us.

Your work still uses PPC architecture? Cool!

 

[ervus]

I was speaking past tense; that company was sold. But in general big compiling tasks can be run in parallel, so more computers can speed it up. If you want to compile for PPC but not on PPC, cross-compiling should also work. The latest 500-core, AI infected whatever-majig could probably do it faster than a stack of Minis. So I guess my point is, you could get more old Macs to speed up compiling or else cross-compile with something faster.

yewtu.be/watch?v=eO33U-qqfME