Speedup GNU make build process - Parallelism?

I build a huge project frequently and this takes long time (more than one hour) to finish even after configuring pre-comp开发者_开发百科iled headers. Are their any guidelines or tricks to allow make work in parallel (e.g. starting gcc in background, ...etc) to allow for faster builds?

Note: Sources and binaries are too large in size to be placed in a ram file system and I don't want to change the directory structure or build philosophy.

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You can try

make -j<number of jobs to run in parallel>

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make -jN is a must now that most machines are multi-core. If you don't want to write -jN each time, you can put

export MAKEFLAGS=-jN

in your .bashrc.

You may also want to checkout distcc.

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If your project is becoming too big for one machine to handle, you can use one of the distributed make replacements, such as Electric Cloud.

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If you want to run your build in parallel,

make -jN

does the job, but keep in mind:

1. N should be equal to the maximum number of threads your machine supports, if you enter a number greater than that, make automatically makes N=maximum number of threads your machine supports
2. make doesn't support parallel build using -jN in MSDOS, it just does a serial build. If you specify -jN, it will downgrade N=1.

Read more here, from the make source: http://cmdlinelinux.blogspot.com/2014/04/parallel-build-using-gnu-make-j.html