What setup works for GNU make parallel jobs (-j) on Windows?
I have tried setting the shell to cmd.exe using MinGW make 3.81, this works in creating the multiple processes but make fails with the "waiting for job" message.
Can this work and what is the best setup? (MinGW / Cygwin / ???) Can someone point me to a working example to test against?
As Far as I can understand, GNU Make's parallel jobs depend on the underlying platform to supply (CPU) load information. This is unfortunately done in a non-Windows-compatible way, and only the "make -j" command does anything scalingwise. That command (without max number of jobs) is potentially quite dangerous, as it will eat memory like a rabid starving dog (I tried it on Qt, and it crashed on QtWebkit, the largest project in Qt, 4GB RAM, Win7).
On second thought, I get the feeling make -j3 runs faster than make, but in light of what I can find on the web (forums, manual...) it seems very POSIX/linux specific functionality.
BTW, I'm surprised your question was voted down.