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

[Gary Oberbrunner]

On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 2:26 PM, William Deegan
<bill at baddogconsulting.com> wrote:

> David,

>

> Firstly, this is a discussion better fitted to the users mailing list.

>

> Secondly as you've posted before it's easy to make the change from the SConstruct level to change the default per project.

>

> In general SCons aims to be a make replacement, and this includes some of the behavior.

> Changing the default to more than -j 1 would break this compatibility.

>

> I'd be against any such change.

>

> Gary - Opinions?


I wouldn't want to change the default, I agree.  However I have heard
requests before for a way to say "use as many cores as the machine
has" and I can see how that would be nice for some situations.
Perhaps -jN (literal N) could be made to do that?  If multiprocessing
isn't available (python too old), it could just use 1. But since it's
quite easy to do in a SConstruct (or even in a site-scons, I think) it
doesn't seem as important as a lot of the things we really do need to
work on.

(Note that some tools, like the Intel linker in -ipo mode, use your
whole machine -- running multiple jobs will only slow things down,
mostly because of swapping.)

-- 
Gary