[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC statusy

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Florian Klaempfl wrote:
> Am 25.12.2012 15:28, schrieb Mattias Gaertner:
>> On Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:55:41 +0100 (CET)
>> marcov at stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) wrote:
>>
>>> [...]
>>> The numbers Martin names (up till 10 times slower, even without 
>>> linking) are
>>> the numbers I have in mind too. IMHO denial without tests is unfair.
>>
>> Maybe the parallelization could be improved?
> 
> Yes, this might be a good solution for the future but last time this 
> topic came up, Martin still wanted to run FPC on some almost 10 years 
> old machine so parallelization does not help. Another thing would be an 
> fpc compiler daemon which stays in memory between compilations and keeps 
> also ppus loaded.

I've got machines which are older than that, but they've almost all got 
multiple processors. I can't remember the exact timing, but a Sun 
machine with 16x 80MHz chips would build the Linux kernel in a minute or 
so, so parallelisation at the  make -j  level can be a big win.

Obviously that doesn't help if somebody's running native builds on an 
obscure development board, or if a multi-CPU/core architecture's got 
very poor aggregate I/O performance, or if certain aspects of SMP quite 
simply aren't reliable (lack of cache coherence on some MIPS systems).

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]