I'd like to put together a doc full of advice on what users can do to reduce how long it takes to build packages. I'm sure that there's plenty of you with your own opinions on this, so let's have it ;-)
Good idea. Here's a few:
If compiling in a console, don't use a framebuffer. Standard resolution console is faster.
I also expect that not using bootsplash/gensplash may help performance, but I have no evidence for this.
Use make -jX to get multiple compilations happening at once. I think most places suggest an X value of one more than your CPU count.
Use your confcache thing. (set MAKEOPTS="-jX" in make.conf)
I remember discussion on implementing epause and a variable to skip the pauses. This would save the odd few seconds here and there ;)
Use the -pipe CFLAG (this doesn't affect the compiled output, just how the messages are printed) - this might be a myth, but apparently its slightly quicker.
gcc 2.95 is quite a bit smaller than gcc3, uses less memory, and is a fair bit quicker at compiling C code (although the resulting binaries are perhaps not quite as optimized). On slow/low-memory environments like my laptop this can be quite handy. Note that gcc2 sucks for C++ :)
Make sure DMA is enabled on hard disks, and that support for the systems IDE controller is compiled into the kernel, and that the appropriate IDE driver is being used (and generic IDE is not).
Daniel
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