Is there any software available in linux which compiles a source code containing large number of files parallely on either multicore or distributed systems. Libraries like gcc or xserver takes very time for compilation on unicore/dual machine and most of the times it is frustrating when you need lot of recompilation. Is there any technique for compiling such source code parallely ?
3 Answers
On distributed-memory systems, you can use distcc to farm out compile jobs to other machines. This takes a little bit of setup, but it can really speed up your build if you happen to have some extra machines around.
On shared-memory multicore systems, you can just use make -j, which will try to spawn build jobs based on the dependencies in your makefiles. You can run like this:
$ make -j
which will impose no limit on the number of jobs spawned, or you can run with an integer parameter:
$ make -j8
which will limit the number of concurrent build jobs. Here, the limit is 8 concurrent jobs. Usually you want this to be something close to the number of cores on your system.
GNU make (the standard make installed on Linux systems) supports parallel command execution - take a look at http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html#Parallel
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