On Sun, 11 Nov 2007, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> Compilation is indeed CPU-bound; however, unless you've taken special
> steps, it's a single process at a time.  What you need to do is specify
> '-j 2' when invoking build.sh, to run two processes simultaneously;
> see /usr/src/BUILDING for details.

In my experience, '-j 2' won't be enough to provide definitive results, 
since that seems to improve performance on uni-processor systems, too 
(though not by as much).  On my AMD X2 systems I run builds with it set 
to '-j 4' and that seems to give the most benefit.

But even on uni-processors '-j 2' will improve things since it gives a 
chance for a second job to run on the (only) CPU while the other one is 
waiting for I/O completion.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
|   Paul Goyette   | PGP DSS Key fingerprint: |  E-mail addresses:   |
| Customer Service | FA29 0E3B 35AF E8AE 6651 |  paul@whooppee.com   |
| Network Engineer | 0786 F758 55DE 53BA 7731 | pgoyette@juniper.net |
----------------------------------------------------------------------