Recent builds don't invalidate everything all the time making ccache useful, and with unified sources preprocessing is a much smaller chunk of build time. Clobber builds: pump mode: 6m non-pump: 6m15s Clobber build with ccache (not possible with pump): 2m Pulling central after a few days and clobbering: ~4m, thanks to ccache. So pump mode is only helpful with complete clobber builds with no recent cache, and only slightly. With non-unified builds it's probably still significantly faster. Ideally this would have a --distcc-pump option for building older trees where it is still a huge improvement.