On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 01:19:41PM -0800, Jose Borquez wrote: > I recently rebuilt my FreeBSD system from sources and it took around 2 > hours on an old PIII 800MHz pc to run "make buildworld". If I include > the -j option to run multiple processes as once such as "make -j2 > buildworld" does that mean it would finish in half the time?
No, that would only be true if you were using less than 50% of your resources (e.g. CPU) - for example, if your system has 2 CPUs. Otherwise, on a single CPU machine you are already using close to 100% of CPU, but you may still achieve a few percent speed-up since e.g. one compiler process can be running while another process is blocked waiting for disk I/O. However, this is balanced against increased kernel overhead and memory use. Kris
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