[Sorry if you get this post twice—let’s say that our internal builds of RapidWeaver 4.0 are still a little buggy, and I needed to re-post this ;)]

Xcode, Apple’s IDE for Mac OS X, has this neat ability to perform distributed compilations across multiple computers. The goal, of course, is to cut down on the build time. If you’re sitting at a desktop on a local network and have a Mac or two to spare, distributed builds obviously make a lot of sense: there’s a lot of untapped power that could be harnessed to speed up your build. However, there’s another scenario where distributed builds can help, and that’s if you work mainly off a laptop and occasionally join a network that has a few other Macs around. When your laptop’s offline, you can perform a distributed build with just your laptop; when your laptop’s connected to a few other Macs, they can join in the build and speed it up.

There’s one problem with idea, though, which is that distributed builds add overhead. I had a strong suspicion that a distributed build with only the local machine was a significant amount slower than a simple individual build. Since it’s all talk unless you have benchmarks, lo and behold, a few benchmarks later, I proved my suspicion right.

• Individual build: 4:50.6 (first run), 4:51.7 (second run)
• Shared network build with local machine only: 6:16.3 (first run), 6:16.3 (second run)

This was a realistic benchmark: it was a full build of RapidWeaver including all its sub-project dependencies and core plugins. The host machine is a 2GHz MacBook with 2GB of RAM. The build process includes a typical number of non-compilation phases, such running a shell script or two (which takes a few seconds), copying files to the final application bundle, etc. So, for a typical Mac desktop application project like RapidWeaver, turning on shared network builds without any extra hosts evokes a pretty hefty speed penalty: ~30% in my case. Ouch. You don’t want to leave shared network builds on when your laptop disconnects from the network. To add to the punishment, Xcode will recompile everything from scratch if you switch from individual builds to distributed builds (and vice versa), so flipping the switch when you disconnect from a network or reconnect to it is going to require a full rebuild.

Of course, there’s no point to using distributed builds if there’s only one machine participating. So, what happens when we add a 2.4GHz 20” Aluminium Intel iMac with 2GB of RAM, via Gigabit Ethernet? Unfortunately, not much:

• Individual build: 4:50.6 (first run), 4:51.7 (second run)
• Shared network build with local machine + 2.4GHz iMac: 4:46.6 (first run), 4:46.6 (second run)

You shave an entire four seconds off the build time by getting a 2.4GHz iMac to help out a 2GHz MacBook. A 1% speed increase isn’t very close to the 40% build time reduction that you’re probably hoping for. Sure, a 2.4GHz iMac is not exactly a build farm, but you’d hope for something a little better than a 1% speed improvement by doubling the horsepower, no? Gustafson’s Law strikes again: parallelism is hard, news at 11.

I also timed Xcode’s dedicated network builds (which are a little different from its shared network builds), but buggered if I know where I put the results for that. I vaguely remember that dedicated network builds was very similar to shared network builds with my two hosts, but my memory’s hazy.

So, lesson #1: there’s no point using distributed builds unless there’s usually at least one machine available to help out, otherwise your builds are just going to slow down. Lesson #2: you need to add a significant amount more CPUs to save a significant amount of time with distributed builds. A single 2.4GHz iMac doesn’t appear to help much. I’m guessing that adding a quad-core or eight-core Mac Pro to the build will help. Maybe 10 × 2GHz Intel Mac minis will help, but I’d run some benchmarks on that setup before buying a cute Mac mini build farm — perhaps the overhead of distributing the build to ten other machines is going to nullify any timing advantage you’d get from throwing another 20GHz of processors into the mix.