Configuring CPAN (MAKE) with P4 Hyper Threading Processor

awohld has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm configuring CPAN and it's asking me this:

Parameters for the 'make' command?
Typical frequently used setting:

    -j3              dual processor system

Your choice:  []
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I have a single P4 processor with hyper threading which Linux treats as a dual processor. Should I enable the -j3 option?

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Re: Configuring CPAN (MAKE) with P4 Hyper Threading Processor by Tanktalus (Canon) on Apr 02, 2006 at 20:20 UTC
I do. It can be faster, but for most CPAN modules, you won't notice a difference. I also have it enabled for my gentoo emerging - there it makes a bigger difference where there are files that really do take billions of cycles to compile. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being "don't you dare" and 5 being "you should have done this months ago", I give it a solid "eh, whatever." :-)	[reply]
Re: Configuring CPAN (MAKE) with P4 Hyper Threading Processor by ambrus (Abbot) on Apr 02, 2006 at 20:39 UTC
If you expect that the makes succeed, then do enable it. However, when you get compilation errors, then the output of a paralel make can be very confusing, so don't enable `-j3` in that case.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Configuring CPAN (MAKE) with P4 Hyper Threading Processor by sgifford (Prior) on Apr 02, 2006 at 23:29 UTC
You should realize that this only affects the speed of building the modules, not the speed of the modules once they're installed. It's not a flag telling the compiler or perl anything, it's just telling `make` it should try to run more than one thing in parallel if possible. So if you get it wrong, you'll just spend a little extra time watching messages fly by from the `CPAN` shell.	[reply]