I remember two huge speedups back in the day: `gcc -pipe` and `make -j`. `gcc -pipe` worked best when you had gobs of RAM. Disk I/O was so slow, especially com

I remember two huge speedups back in the day: `gcc -pipe` and `make -j`. `gcc -pipe` worked best when you had gobs of RAM. Disk I/O was so slow, especially compared to DRAM, that the ability to bypass all those temp file steps was a god-send. So you'd always opt for the pipeline if you could fill memory. `make -j` was the easiest parallel processing hack ever. As long as you had multiple CPUs or cores, `make -j` would fill them up and keep them all busy as much as possible. Now, you could place artificial limits such as `-j4` or `-j8` if you wanted to hold back some resources or keep interactivity. But the parallelism was another god-send when you had a big compile job. It was often a standard but informal benchmark to see how fast your system could rebuild a Linux kernel, or a distro of XFree86.