There seems to be some controversy on whether the number of jobs in GNU make is supposed to be equal to the number of cores, or if you can optimize the build time by adding one extra job that can be queued up while the others "work".
Is it better to use -j4
or -j5
on a quad core system?
Have you seen (or done) any benchmarking that supports one or the other?
From my experience, there must be some performance benefits when adding extra jobs. It is simply because disk I/O is one of the bottle necks besides CPU. However it is not easy to decide on the number of extra jobs as it is highly inter-connected with the number of cores and types of the disk being used.