On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 3:37 AM, Pandu Poluan <pa...@poluan.info> wrote: > Have anyone experienced problems with MAKEOPTS? > > I have a quad-core system, so I put in "-j5". But that resulted in > emerge fails for binutils and ppl. I have to change it to "-j3" before > ppl can be emerged, even "-j1" before binutils can be emerged. > > Anyone experiencing the same?
Sometimes. My understanding is that it comes from packages which are badly constructed, and can't reliably handle parallel builds. I'm told that these cases are bugs and should be reported. Sometimes, if I watch build output fly by, I'll even see something like make -j10 -j1 (some target name) where a maintainer decided to put an overriding -j1 after MAKEOPTS. About two years ago, I found that, on my system (quad-core AMD Phenom 9650), -j8 resulted in the fastest build time, as measured by building ffmpeg.[1] Currently, I'm running -j10, and that's because I've been using distcc to pass a couple compile tasks off to other systems. (Though with the box I was deferring to scrapped for parts, I'll drop this down to -j8 again) [1] Tested by building in tmpfs. You can find my data here: http://multimedia.cx/eggs/ffmpeg-and-multiple-build-threads/#comment-150325 -- :wq
