I have a workstation that 3 people log into for compiling source code. Our project consists of about 1000 files and GCC compiles that to a ~200MB .elf file (with debug).
Our current workstation is an Intel Core 2 CPU X6800 @ 2.93GHz with 2 software-RAID0 SATA 7.2K RPM drives and 8GB of memory.
The system works well when 1 person is doing a compile, but things slow down dramatically when 2 people try to do a compile at the same time. Using distcc to distribute compilation to other servers helps some, but of course that doesn't help the link time. The link can take a long time.
What would be a good hard-drive/memory configuration for a new server? I'm hoping to spend less than $5-6K total. For example:
Is RAID0 a good idea for this workload? I've heard RAID0 may hurt seek time, which I imagine might hurt when compiling lots of small files?
If I want to support 3 developers, would it be better to buy 3 cheap machines, or 1 big server for my price range?
Given my price range, should I consider 15K SCSI drives? Or would 2 SW/HW-RAID0 SATA 7.2K drives perform almost as well?
Example loading during 2 makes:
Tasks: 238 total, 1 running, 237 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.5% us, 3.5% sy, 0.6% ni, 90.0% id, 4.3% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.1% si
Mem: 8096556k total, 8052960k used, 43596k free, 50248k buffers
Swap: 2040212k total, 224k used, 2039988k free, 6745740k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
18972 user1 15 0 138m 131m 1076 D 10 1.7 0:03.25 ld
3414 user2 18 0 6148 1024 476 D 8 0.0 0:14.97 mv
18975 user3 18 0 61672 12m 652 D 6 0.2 0:00.52 make