[arch-general] Default value of "j" in makeflags of makepkg.conf

[Isaac Dupree]

On 01/03/2014 04:03 PM, Mark Lee wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-01-03 at 15:55 -0500, Isaac Dupree wrote:
>> On 01/03/2014 10:37 AM, Anatol Pomozov wrote:
>>> Using -j$(cpunum) is a sane default that saves a lot of time to users.
>>
>> I agree, but for the record, 'nice' and scheduling are no panacea in my
>> experience.  It's fine for CPU loads, but compilations are also
>> disk-heavy (which mattered when I used a spinning disk) and sometimes
>> RAM-heavy (-j8 on my pet C++ project uses 2GB of RAM, which could push
>> other programs I'm using into swap).
>>
>> -Isaac
>>
>>
>
> Salutations,
>
> I got to ask why you are running make with 8 threads on a system with
> only 2 GB of ram?

Heh.  Well, I have 8 GB of RAM, but I'm often using most of it already. 
  $(nproc) is 8 because there are 4 cores with each with hyperthreading 
(Intel Core i7).  The project builds roughly at the same speed on this 
box at anywhere from -j4 to -j8; if that generalizes to other projects 
and there's an easy way to count cores not hyperthreads, cores might be 
a better Arch default.  Shrugs.

There are quite a few 4GB i7 systems out there too.  Quad core ARM 
systems are another point on the cores-to-RAM-ratio spectrum.

Probably most code doesn't consume 256 MB RAM per GCC invocation.  C++'s 
templates and lack of module system...

-Isaac