It will always have some impact because you're thrashing the caches. A couple more things to try: Reduce swappiness. Linux tries to swap out idle pages to fr

It will always have some impact because you're thrashing the caches. A couple more things to try: Reduce swappiness. Linux tries to swap out idle pages to free memory for block cache, even when there's only light memory pressure. If you have a dozen processes working hard and your UI is untouched for several minutes, it can get swapped out and lag. sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=1 Set the CPU affinity for your build processes to exclude CPU 0, ensuring one is always free for UI: taskset 0xFFFFFFFE nice your_build_command_here Neither is perfect but they can help.