On Wed, 2025-06-25 at 13:34 +0200, wrotycz wrote: > At the moment, though this moment lasts for decades now, -j/--jobs > without argument starts infinite number of parallel jobs. > Practice shows that compilation with jobs bigger than number of > available threads is not faster in any way, only uses more memory and > more processor too.
I don't think your conclusion is correct, at least not for everyone and in all situations. There are plenty of scenarios where using more jobs than processor threads results in faster builds: it all depends on what your recipes do, that kind of hardware you have, and things like the ratio between amount of time waiting for external resources like disk or network IO versus processing time to complete the recipe. But anyway I don't disagree that the number of processor threads is a good default metric. However, -j without any limit works the way it does because it is intended to be used in conjunction with -l.
