2011/8/1 Krzysztof Kosiński <tweenk.pl@...400...>:
Go for a multicore machine with at least 4GB of RAM. I have Intel Core i7-920, from the low end of the i7 family, 6GB RAM and a standard HDD, and a clean build with make -j8 takes only a few minutes. Most of the time on small rebuilds (e.g. a few files changed) is actually spent processing the Autotools cruft in makefiles, and linking is a close second.
I remember discussing the jobs thing with Kees a few years back and he mentioned that you should actually assign jobs for all devices (not just cores/threads) to maximize speed. Basically -j9 if you have one HDD in the mix as well, -j10 if you have a RAID with two drives, etc. I don't recall all the details about it, but it does make a slight difference in my experience.
Cheers, Josh