Out of curiousity, I thought I'd try running make buildworld with the -j option in a few different configurations to see what difference it made. I know it's supposed to speed up the process by a certain amount because of the parallel processing, but there's no direct quantifier.
I put together a shell script that had this several times over make clean echo `date` >> /home/justin/benchmark.txt echo 'make -j2 buildworld' >> /home/justin/benchmark.txt make -j2 buildworld echo `date` >> /home/justin/benchmark.txt echo " " >> /home/justin/benchmark.txt I did this with no -j, -j1, -j2, and -j3 Looking at the result: 1 hour 15 minutes 40-something seconds, every time, no matter the -j setting. This is on a 1.6G Celeron, with a PATA drive and ~350M ram. Would I see a difference if the CPU was faster and the drive was slower? If someone had some free CPU cycles to waste and could time a buildworld as above, I'd be interested in the results. I'd like to see under what conditions the -j flag becomes useful or not useful, or if perhaps I'm just missing something.
