One of the challenges that any developer faces is finding a small test case that reproduces a defect reported by users. That's often easier said than done: when the defect originally shows up during parsing of a makefile consisting of 20,000 lines of nested calls to $(eval), separating the interesting...
Agile is great. It seems that everyone is either adopting or talking about it (of course many of those will probably be perpetually adopting and talking). However not everyone is succeeding with Agile. One reason is that in order for Agile to work well you need highly experienced developers that...
Imagine if you discovered your colleagues only work 4 hours a day. You thought everyone was working as hard as you until you started monitoring what they did all day. To your surprise, many of them were idle for hours at a time, just sitting still waiting for someone to...
When we talk about parallel builds at Electric Cloud, we're most likely to be talking about ElectricAccelerator, which does an awesome job of speeding up builds automatically, giving 10-20x speedups on a regular basis. We sometimes forget to mention that ElectricCommander can also be used to parallelize build processes, with...
If you've been using GNU make for some time, you are probably familiar with both pattern rules and target-specific variables. You may even be familiar with the intersection of these features: pattern-specific variables. But you may not be aware of a subtle change in gmake 3.81 which affects the processing...
ElectricAccelerator annotation files contain a gold mine of information about your build, such as the dependencies between jobs in the build, the time required to run each job, the exact command-line and environment used to invoke each command in the build, and even every file read and written by each...
One rookie performance mistake I've seen in GNU make makefiles is the use of $(shell) without := assignment. Of course I'm not the first person to write about this, but people are still making this mistake, and it's so easy to fix, it's really tragic that it's still out there....
Are you using the best method for invoking submakes in a recursive make based build? A simple change can turn on the afterburners by unlocking parallelism. (more…)...
Somebody asked me the other day, "How much does the ElectricAccelerator filesystem cache reduce I/O load on my build host?" This is an interesting question, because in some cases, the impact of Accelerator caching is a big part of the performance benefit. Consider the case of ClearCase dynamic views, which...
In this continuation of the ElectricAccelerator vs. distcc battle royale, I'll compare the performance of these two tools when building samba, a suite of tools that provide file and print services to Windows clients from Unix-like servers. Samba is a particularly interesting package for this comparison because distcc was originally...
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