[omerhj]

Nearly twenty years ago I had a little server farm of old PCs. Two or three Pentium-133s, one dual Pentium Pro 200 machine, and my pride and joy, a Pentium 3 running at 600 MHz. I was trying to get familiar with Gentoo and to make recompiling everything all the time more bearable I set up distcc so my P3 could do most of the work. It worked very well!

But after a few weeks every Gentoo box in the house started crashing regularly. It took me a while to figure out what was going on: one of the slower machines had developed a single-bit memory error and was sharing corrupted .so files with all other machines.

[klodolph]

Yeah. Everyone I’ve talked to who has run a build cluster has recommended ECC for the build cluster, even if they’ve decided not to use ECC for other systems. Some people would run Hackintosh-like setups for macOS build clusters, just for the ECC.

Reproducible builds are also a big win here.

[omerhj]

Absolutely! This was a very educational experience.

[Fatnino]

I had to break into a laptop for my dad last week. Last used 7 years ago. Running win2k on a pentium 3.

Had to jump through various hoops and find creative ways around problems (laptop too old to boot from USB, all my modern machines lack optical drives. And so on) but I did eventually break in.

[bombcar]

I still need to get around to setting up distcc; I only have two Gentoo servers, but one is so much more powerful than the other, and their CPUs are close enough I might be able to use ccache, too ...

[ComputerGuru]

> their CPUs are close enough I might be able to use ccache, too

It’s the compiler that needs to line up for that. But my recommendation is to install sccache which will figure it out for you.