> Sure. The key is that you have 8 GB of RAM, nothing large running to eat it, and you > do make clean ; make ; make clean ; make. Everything runs out of RAM cache then and > it's super-fast pretty much regardless of your processor speed.
And I presume this is on Linux, where gcc runs quite nicely? Because I do the same thing on my quad-core hyperthreaded 2.8GHz 6GB Windows system and it's nowhere near 30 seconds, even when entirely in the cache, which I generally attribute to mingw being poorly optimized for Windows.