On 9/6/2011 7:14 AM, Duncan Sands wrote:
this means using as many processes as there are CPUs, right? It seems pretty dubious to me to use more processes than the user maybe asked for.
We often find that the optimum number of processes is a little bit more than the number of physical processes (not surprising when there is mixed I/O computation going on.
For example I have to restrict the number of CPUs used when building GCC to less than I have since otherwise my machine overheats and turns itself off.
That seems a (pretty disastrous) engineering error in the design of your machine. In a properly designed machine, extra fans should come on to counteract the extra heating (that's certainly what happens on my Toshiba R700 with is the new core i7-2620M with four cores.
Is there some way to get at the -j level the user passed to the top-level make and use that?
I am pretty sure you can specify any -j value you like, but will let Arno clarify that.