Alias make to automatically use multiple cores?
 

Newbie question here. I just realized that I can tell make to use multiple cores to compile by doing which is just awesome on a quad core with hyperthreading (I just compiled 2.6.33-rc5 in under 5 minutes!)

I know aliases are possible, though I've never had much need. What I would like to know now, is if it would be safe to alias make to mean so that by default I use 6 of the procesors when building or if there would be occasions that compiling on multiple processors would be a bad thing?

I realize it's maybe not necessary, but it I'm forgetful and impatient and something about it just seems cool to me.....

It's not necessarily 'compiling' on multiple cores, just running multiple make commands. The performance increase would depend on how many tasks could be run synchronously ( parallel ) inside the one makefile or whether you're building multiple applications at once.

A bit of testing may help decide whether it's worth it

cheers

If the kernel build was any indication, it is DEFINITELY worth it, provided there are no serious risks. it was easily 3 to 4 times faster with

I doubt there would be any risk.. but it depends on what else the computer is used for - other processes may suffer.

i.e if you're doing this at work then don't run it on a production server :)

cheers

It's actually just my tinker-toy so while building something I'm generally just surfing around for info on whatever it is I'm doing. The OS perceives my machine to have 8 cores so even at 4 cores being used to build the kernel, top indicates under 50% CPU load which seemed like a waste to me.

Thanks for the replies.

I've read recently (somewhere?) the best practice is:

Do you have any idea where you read that? That seems counter intuitive to me, but I'd definitely be interested in the read.:)

Instead, set the environment variable MAKEFLAGS, for example in your ~/.bashrc:
export MAKEFLAGS=-j5

To temporarily remove it, issue: unset MAKEFLAGS

Sorry, can't remember exactly, but it was probably while I was browsing through one of these two:

http://delicious.com/tag/linux

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/

I did find reference to the +1 here http://blogs.koolwal.net/2009/04/20/tip-compile-your-programs-fasters-with-multiple-processor-machines/ I'll definitely have to give that a shot with my next build.

Thanks for the tip.

On a Slack system with no .bashrc by default, can that just be added to /etc/profile?