[vtk-developers] Build VTK in 9 min 28 sec

[Andy Cedilnik]

Hi all!

A while ago I posted some timing results stating that I can build VTK in
18 minutes. What I did not say was that this was per processor time not
clock time. I tested building VTK the "right" way:

STIME=$( python -c "import time; print time.time()" )
echo -n " $STIME"
make -j 2 &> /dev/null
ETIME=$( python -c "import time; print time.time()" )
echo -n " ... $ETIME"
TTIME=$( python -c "print $ETIME - $STIME" )
TTIMEM=$( python -c "print $TTIME / 60.0" )
echo " = $TTIME s ( $TTIMEM min )

and it outputs:

1023711532.46 ... 1023712100.54 = 568.079999924 s ( 9.46799999873 min )

So, this is clock time with overhead of calling python etc.

Now, just for your information:
Dual AMD Athlon MP 1600+ (1.4 GHz)
1GB RAM
No RAID SCSI Hard Drive
Sourcerer Linux (kernel 2.4.17)
Reiserfs
gcc 2.95.3

Another small comment, last time I was doing make -j 10. I did a series
of tests, where I ran the top script for make -j 1, 2, 3, 4, ... , 14
and the result is that there is twice improvement when going from make
-j 1 to make -j 2, but no improvement at all when going higher.

For non gmake people, make -j x means spawn x parallel builds.

				Andy