> I think the piece I'm missing is the behavior of the scheduler. Does it now make its decisions based on task group cpu consumption instead of process? I saw o

> I think the piece I'm missing is the behavior of the scheduler. Does it now make its decisions based on task group cpu consumption instead of process? I saw options to that effect back around 2.6.25. Yes, and yes. Previously you could set things like this up explicitly, this makes it (optionally) automatic. > Why is this an improvement over just nicing the "make -j64" into the basement That gives you... I think 10% less CPU weight per level, so you can get down to 13% of base. So your 64 processes will still weigh about 8x one base process. This lets you consider everything spawned from your terminal as one group, and everything from your X session as another, so your compile processes collectively (no matter how many you have) weigh as much as your GUI processes collectively weigh.