Dmake is very very slow in our builds (HELP please!!!)

Question

We use dmake (with makedepend) in our builds and our build time for the entire system is extremely slow (it takes 17+ hours to do a clean build).
Could anybody suggest a solution or remedy to help us reduce the long build times.
We use solaris 2.6 with Forte 6.0 C++. Our sources are mounted on a shared filesystem/disk and they are not local to where the build happens.
Any help in this regard is highly appreciated.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Your build server has 2 CPUs, so it makes sense to use
dmake in parallel mode instead of make. I'm responsible
enginerr for both, make and dmake, and I can say that
they are compatible. People, who don't care about the
build time, can use any of them. People, who cares about
build time, should use 'dmake -m parallel -j 8' if they have
only 2 CPUs.
Of course each build can have some specific, but in
general it makes sense to allow 4xN parallel jobs (where
N is the number of CPUs). Also there is an ability to run
this build on several build servers (see 'man dmake' for
details about the build in distributed mode), or to run this
build in "grid" mode, but first of all you have to make sure
it works in parallel mode.
So I suggest you to try the following experiment:
1. Replace "make" with "$(MAKE)" in makefiles
2. Run build with "time dmake -m parallel -j 8 ..."
If you see that "user"+"sys" time is twice bigger than the
"real" on a 2 CPU system, this is the best result this
build can show. If "user"+"sys" is less than the "real"
time, there is a room for imrovement.
Please, let me know the results.
Thanks,
Nik