Hello, Now that I'm back from having to serve in the armed services, I've picked up work on parallel building for the ports again. There is some conventional wisdom floating around these parts that says you should run make -j with a number one higher than the number of CPUs you have. As I wondered what difference that makes, I ran some benchmarks. Since maybe someone else is curious about this too, I'll publish my results here.
Here's the summary: on my core 2 duo machine (= 2 CPUs), this is the time improvement to build the port (just configuring and building, no installation) with -j3 over -j2: x11-toolkits/gtk20: 2% x11/kdebase3: 1% graphics/gimp-app: 24% lang/gcc41: 12% So basically, -j3 really is faster than -j2, although the difference is substantial only for some ports. Here's the script I use to produce the numbers, as well as my raw results which contain much more detail: http://www.maxlor.com/freebsd/files/parallel_benchmark.sh http://www.maxlor.com/freebsd/files/parallel_benchmark.ods Cheers Benjamin
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