I'm putting together a distributed build farm with DistGCC to speed up our teams compile times and just looking for thoughts on which processors to use in the hosts.
Are we going to get a noticeable decrease in time using 8 cores vs. 4-hyperthreaded cores?
Big difference in time between i7 and Xeon? etc, etc.
Just need advice from people who've put together kick-a build clusters.
We've got a majority of the normal things to speed up builds in place (pre-compiled headers, ccache, local gigabit connections between them, tons of ram, etc) so please just give advice on the best processor to use. And money is a factor, but anythings doable if the performance increase is noticeable.
Thanks.
Jay
EDIT:
Although any advice IS welcome, please refrain from "Do this first" posts as we're not planning on skimping on things like SSD, maxed out RAM, etc.
My personal system is a iMac Quad-core i5 with 8GB of RAM. When I build our project locally, my processor floats around 99-100% a majority of the time, which makes me assume it is a bottleneck, even if you made everything else faster. My ram on the other hand doesn't even get close to maxing out.
It's also worth noting that I did research this, however every discussion I could find was primarily for gaming machines, which is obviously a different beast in usage. These machines won't even have monitors or anything but integrated graphics since they have one purpose: Build freakin fast. (hopefully)
