Work smarter, not harder

A part of my project includes writing a plugin to help visualize data. For building plugins, I needed to compile ParaView from source and as you may or may not know, installing programs this way can sometimes take a considerable amount of time.

The build ended up taking roughly three hours of my precious, precious time. But the day was just beginning! Apparently plugins compiled using the 4.0 version of ParaView don’t work on the 3.14 version I was working with. That is what you get for git-ing the newest version without thinking!

I dreaded the concept of having to wait yet another three hours simply waiting, since the coffee machine was still recovering from my earlier “productivity”. So I asked myself…

A quick trip to the library (also known as man make) revealed that the make command can be run in parallel on multiple cores with the j flag. According to mpstat, I had access to 12 CPU-s on the node I was working on. With a shade of good old estonian cynicism I started the build process again, this time with -j12 hopefully speeding things up.

(Un)surprisingly, the build process reached 100% completion in just 20 minutes! Who could have known parallelization actually worked?