> > 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.
Yes, my compiles are timed on Linux; and the thing is, I created a 2 GB RAM disk and copied the entire MAME source tree to the RAM disk before compiling, so I thought I had eliminated all I/O from my benchmarking. I only have 4 GB total memory so only 2 GB was left for the compiler but I checked and I never went into swap during the compile. Then again, since the compiled source was in the ram disk and the generated objects files were too, maybe memory bandwidth was limiting me?