On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 7:33 AM, Nikos Chantziaras <rea...@arcor.de> wrote: > On 01/27/2011 03:11 PM, Dale wrote: >> >> [...] >> I am using the -j option for the first time now. I'm updating KDE. It >> seems to work fine. It doesn't scroll all the stuff like with a regular >> emerges but this new rig is so fast, I can't read it anyway. I did have >> a package to fail and it spit out the error for me to read. > > You don't need that if you have MAKEOPTS set in your make.conf, which is > preferred. The -j option of emerge emerges multiple packages, while with > MAKEOPTS set to "-j4" or whatever does a parallel build in the same package > (meaning compiling multiple source files at the same time). > > It's preferred because with "emerge -jN" the last package will only use one > CPU, while with "-jN" in MAKEOPTS even the last package will use N CPUs. > Furthermore, emerge can't always build N packages at the same time because > one can depend on the other, so it will have to wait until the dependency is > built.
I use MAKEOPTS = -j12 along with emerge --jobs for portage. Needless to say my CPU is fully utilized during an emerge of KDE. :)
