OT: productivity and long computing delays

[Steve Holden]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> skip at pobox.com writes:
> 
>>    Paul> Anyway, I did the same build on a 2 ghz Athlon 64 and was
>>    Paul> surprised that the speedup was only 35% or so.  I'd have to get a
>>    Paul> multiprocessor box to obtain really substantial gains.
>>
>>Maybe your build process is i/o bound.  If you're using GNU make and have
>>the make dependencies set up properly, the -jN flag (for N = 2 or 3) may
>>speed things up.
> 
> 
> It's almost all CPU-bound on both the Pentium M and the Athlon.  But I
> wasn't as much asking for technical approaches to speeding up
> calculation, as for general strategy about dealing with this downtime
> productively (I figured it was ok to ask this, given the other thread
> about RSI).  My workday is getting chopped up in a manner sort of like
> memory fragmentation in a program, where you end up with a lot of
> disjoint free regions that are individually too small to use.
> 
> As for the technical part, the underlying problem has to do with the
> build system.  I should be able to edit a source file, type "make" and
> recompile just that file and maybe a few related ones.  But the
> results of doing that are often incorrect, and to make sure the right
> thing happens I have to rebuild.  I'm not in a position right now to
> start a side project to figure out what's wrong with the build system
> and fix it.

Well why not study it while the build system is running? Needn't be a 
full-blown project, but it sounds like you might save yourself a lot of 
pain for relatively little effort.

regards
  Steve
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