Build farms using ccnet

Question

Is it possible to use CruiseControl.Net to set up a build farm? We currently have 4 different build machines building different things at different times and have a bit of a headache to manually balance the load somehow. I would prefer to designate one of them to be the master build machine, which would delegate work to the other ones when they are free.

Answer 1

As far as I can determine, there is no support in CruiseControl.Net for build farms - at least not operating the way you describe. CCNet's interpretation of "farm" seems to assume that projects are assigned manually to a machine and a given project will always be built on the same machine.

If you wanted to dynamically select which machine actually performs the build, you would need to create your own mechanism to select that machine and trigger the build on it. There is likely to be quite a bit of complexity associated with this. For instance you would probably need to ensure that the same project does not get built simultaneously on two different machines if a second commit occurs while the previous commit is still being processed.

If there is a shared location that all the build machines can access, it may be possible to use the Filesystem source control block or CCNet's ForceBuild mechanism to start the build on the designated machine, but have all the build machines publish their output for a given project to the same final location.

Answer 2

See load-Balancing the Build Farm with CruiseControl.NET blogpost for a possible solution