Paul> Anyway, I did the same build on a 2 ghz Athlon 64 and was Paul> surprised that the speedup was only 35% or so. I'd have to get a Paul> multiprocessor box to obtain really substantial gains.
Maybe your build process is i/o bound. If you're using GNU make and have the make dependencies set up properly, the -jN flag (for N = 2 or 3) may speed things up. Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list