[Sunhelp] Multi-processor make?

[James Lockwood]

On Sat, 20 Nov 1999, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> ok, so it's not sun-specific, but I'm trying this on my SS20.  When I run
> make and other similar things as part of the built process, they seem to
> only take advantage of one processor.  I don't know this for sure, but it
> looks that way from the little CDE performance monitor, it usually sits at
> just over half, and goes to full if I start "making" something in a
> different window.  So, my question.  Is there a flag that I should/can
> specify to tell make to take advantage of my multiple processors?  Thanks,

With gmake (GNU) or dmake (Sun Workshop) use the -j option.  This tells it
the upper bound of how many seperate instances of the makefile should be
processed simultaneously.  The default is 1.

dmake can also parallelize makes across multiple machines, a real
boost when you have multiple systems available.  You get a nearly linear
speedup.

Some (poorly written) makefiles have problems with parallel makes.  Most
do not.

-James