[ChuckMcM]

It may be a Windows thing. I too started reading the post and was thinking, why not -j128 or -j64 depending on if HT was on and then realized that the author's system wasn't one that had been tuned for decades to build software as quickly as possible :-).

It would be an interesting academic exercise to create a setup on Linux that did the same thing but using the extant build tools, and then to do a deep dive into how much of the computer was actually compiling code and how much of it was running the machinery of the OS/IDE/Linkages. A LONG time ago we used to do that at Sun to profile the "efficiency" of a machine in order to maximize the work it did for the user per unit time, vs other things. That sort of activity however became less of a priority as the CPUs literally became 1000x faster.

[archi42]

We're running our builds and tests on both Windows 10 and Linux. At least for Windows 7, the compiler start up time had a huge impact on total run time. I think back then we had 2500 tests, each compiled, then linked, and then dwarfdumped and then some more tools (we build a compiler). We moved some stuff to Linux (eg dwarfdump) and saved a few program executions by compiling & linking single c file tests in one step (yeah, the driver still calls everything, but the driver is called once less). I was under the impression Windows 10 improved on that (we didn't benchmark in detail since then, since it's still far enough), but on Linux I don't have to bat an eye on eg make -j32.

BTW, the author messed up anyway. Make -j does schedule everything at once. How do I know? Only way I got my private 128GB build host to oom...