On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Bob Friesenhahn <bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote: > I suspect that this anaysis has been mentioned on the Automake list before > but (if so) it is worth looking at again. It seems that few packages > benefit significantly from parallel builds. Many packages use Automake, but > they use it in a very inefficient way. Here is a web page which shows the > current pitiful state of parallel builds: > > http://hubble.gforge.inria.fr/parallel-builds.html > > Given that even desktop and laptop computers support 4 CPU cores and that > affordable server type hardware is available with as many as 64 CPU cores, > it is useful if the build process of packages is redone so that it benefits > from compilation on modern hardware.
http://mingw-w64.sf.net/ makes excessive use of massive parallelism. In fact, we can build every single file in parallel, thanks to a strong focus on non-recursive make. At one point in our build process, we have to build several thousand libX.a files from corresponding X.def files. This can be parallelized down to 1 job per library.
