Is it worth recompiling for dual core?

I've just bought a new pc with dual core. Is it worth building none/some/all apps from source to take advantage of the second processor?
My guess is only some apps will benefit from having two processors, things like multimedia, can anyone confirm?

In answer to your first question, programs that support SMP (symmetric multiprocessing--the use of multiple cores/CPUs) should not need to be recompiled with a different ./configure flag (e.g. /var/abs/extra/gimp/PKGBUILD says that the GIMP is compiled with --enable-mp by default on Arch). However, modern CPUs (whether multi-core or not) support various optimizations (specific to each CPU) that may improve performance beyond Arch's default CFLAGS, which on i686 is CFLAGS="-march=i686 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe". Using ABS, you can recompile [core], [extra], [community], and [testing] packages with your own CFLAGS, which you should probably copy from the wiki according to your specific CPU. Just note that you probably won't notice much of a difference in performance, if any, from Arch's default CFLAGS, so I don't recommend recompiling all your software from source. Let me refer you to CRUX or Gentoo if you want to follow that road. Of course, you should still set CPU-specific CFLAGS in your /etc/makepkg.conf because they apply to the AUR as well as ABS. While it's probably not worth recompiling all your software just to optimize a little bit further, you might as well optimize your AUR builds since you have to compile from source anyway.
In answer to your second question, yes you should use MAKEFLAGS="-j3". I've never had a program fail to compile because of make -j3, and it almost doubles the speed of compilation. Definitely use it. Actually, according to this, MAKEFLAGS="-j2" might be slightly faster, but I've always followed the convention of adding 1 to the number of processors or cores.

Similar Messages

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