Icecream/icecc

Icecream project, a software created by SUSE and based on ideas and code by distcc, has revolutionized the process of compiling software. Similar to distcc, Icecream takes compile jobs from your (KDE) build and distributes them to remote machines, allowing for a parallel build on multiple machines. However, Icecream uses a central server that schedules the compile jobs to the fastest free server, making it dynamic and much more efficient.

This advantage is especially useful for shared computers as the scheduler ensures that the compile jobs are distributed in the most efficient way. However, if you're the only user on multiple machines, you have full control over them anyway. To use Icecream, you need one machine that runs the scheduler and many machines that run the daemon.

To compile using Icecream, you need to ensure that $prefix/bin is the first entry in your path. You can do this by typing "export PATH=/opt/icecream/bin:$PATH" and putting it in ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile, so you don't have to type it every time. Then, you just compile with make -j , where is the amount of jobs you want to compile in parallel. As a starting point, take the number of logical processors multiplied by 2, but note that numbers >15 can cause trouble. Here's an example: make CC=icecc -j6.

Finally, it's essential to keep in mind that Icecream should never be used in untrusted environments. If you have to, run the daemons and scheduler as an unprivileged user in such networks. However, you will have to rely on homogeneous networks then. If you want to see some funny statistics, you can run "icemon". Overall, Icecream is an excellent software that can speed up compiling processes and make them much more efficient.