[Scons-dev] [Scons-users] Default number of jobs

roberto de vecchi roberto.devecchi at vi-grade.com
Mon Jul 30 10:35:48 EDT 2012


I completely agree with Marc comments. In my experience disk speed is the
limiting factor for speeding up builds so increasing the number of parallel
job may in some cases only saturate the disk I/O capability.

Roberto



> -----Original Message-----

> From: scons-users-bounces at scons.org [mailto:scons-users-bounces at scons.org]

> On Behalf Of Marc Branchaud

> Sent: Monday, July 30, 2012 16:26

> To: SCons users mailing list

> Cc: SCons developer list

> Subject: Re: [Scons-users] [Scons-dev] Default number of jobs

>

> Please don't change the default number of jobs.

>

> For one thing, not all builds benefit from parallelism. Ours currently

> doesn't -- the disk cache gets overwhelmed, even with just a small -j

> value on a 16-core 32GB machine. What's more, the optimal level of

> parallelism (best number of jobs/core) differs from project to project.

> Finding the sweet spot is generally a matter of trial, tuning, and

> error.

>

> More importantly, it can be quite difficult to diagnose problems in

> parallelized builds, especially since output from simultaneous commands

> is jumbled together. Parallel failures of simultaneous commands are

> especially confusing.

>

> When developing a build, it's best if your tools don't assume they can

> do surprising things. Parallelism is one such surprising thing. Using

> an explicit flag to turn it on is a good way for the user to tell the

> tool that she's ready for some possible weirdness.

>

> M.

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