Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days

putting ccache on the same partition as the objdir and turning on hard linking should help. See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/darin/archives/005504.html and http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2005/01/sharing_binarie.html

I'm not sure about ccache, but I have some experience with having CVS repositories on a different machine.

When I was at UChicago I had a Windows laptop and a Linux desktop. The hard disk on my Windows laptop was really slow, so I set up a Samba share on my Linux desktop with the source tree, mapped it as a drive on Windows and I used that as my sourcedir. The objdir was on my Windows laptop.

Because I/O for sourcedir/objdir was happening on different disks, I found that compilation was significantly faster, even though the source tree wasn't even on the same machine!

It's possible though that this speed gain is limited to scenarios where the local hard disk is very slow, and the hard disk on the machine you're accessing over ethernet is much faster (as was my case). YMMV, but it never hurts to try!

The ccache hard link thing has the problem roc describes....

Ali, I'd probably keep the sourcedir and objdir on the same hard drive (just due to various space and partitioning constraints), but I'm basically thinking of pushing all the sourcedirs and objdirs off the hard drive the CVS repository and ccache live on.

I would say with a great deal of certainty that splitting I/O tasks across drives will be much faster in this case. If you're reading from one place and writing to another, especially with a lot of small files, the latency of putting stuff "on the wire" for the SCSI bus is far outweighed by the accumulated latency for the repeated movement of the drive heads.

Assuming the reading drive can read the data in question as fast as the other can write it, it'll be a net speedup, probably very significant.