I wish I could upvote this more. There is no way compilation is I/O bound. Even over the network this is true. My old lab had homedirs all on NFS (gigabit I

I wish I could upvote this more. There is no way compilation is I/O bound. Even over the network this is true. My old lab had homedirs all on NFS (gigabit I think, but that's not too important) and all our builds were CPU-bound, even without raising the -j argument from cores+1. The same lab (before I was there) even wrote a paper on why the "compile" test is a horrible one for measuring filesystem performance; it just doesn't do enough I/O. I'd be interested to see what happens if you were to compile something large written in assembly (or close to it), but I'd put money that just the sequential optimizer would be slower than I/O. EDIT: found the paper and an article about it http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7464/1.html http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7464/1.html http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-fsbench.html http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-fsbench.html