There is a cool write up on how you can speed you build process by using multiple processes (parellel processing). The command is pretty simple. Once you have configured your source, you just run: make -j n where n is the number of jobs. If you leave n empty, it will use infinite number of jobs to compile your program. On my dual core pc on linux my compile speed almost doubled when I used this with infinite number of jobs. Unfortunately, this may not work for all programs. Also, if the software being compiled is large, the system tends to freeze until its done compiling. Here is the link to the article: http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/parallel_make.html