just noticed new use flag in recent stable chromium ebuild: $ quse -D jumbo-build local:jumbo-build:www-client/chromium: Combine source files to speed up build process.
setting that significantly speeds up emerge time (tried it twice; the second attempt had the flag set) $ qlop -gHv -d `date +%Y-%m-%d` chromium chromium-63.0.3239.132: Fri Jan 19 03:15:43 2018: 1 hour, 47 minutes, 28 seconds chromium-63.0.3239.132: Fri Jan 19 06:11:06 2018: 1 hour, 16 minutes, 14 seconds chromium: 2 times not sure if it matters in that context, but I'm using distcc and do not have ccache though