icecream and ccache has been a killer combo for my development routine, even if I only connect my workstation with the laptop which I would otherwise almost never use.

distcc didn't for example handle the load balancing well in my experiments whereas icecream did much better on that front and thus resulting with noticeably shorter build times. icecream also comes with a nice GUI (icemon) which can come really handy, e.g. you can use it to observe the build jobs and debug when things go south.

But I didn't know that sccache also supports distributed builds. From your comment it seems as if this was a recentish addition. I wonder how polished it is but I will definitely give it a try at some moment.

Sounds like you invented your own Turbopack (by Vercel) [0], which basically does what you're talking about, it hosts a remote cache that parallel build servers can access, cutting down compile times by quite a lot.

[0] https://turbo.build/pack

Documentation is encouraging. I loved icecream when it was working but it had serious reliability problems. This looks worth trying as a replacement, thanks.