make -j 4 is really make -j 8 for buildworld?

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1040114001713.40206A-100000 at fledge.watson.org>, Robe
rt Watson writes:
>
>A few times in the past, I've noticed that when I run 'make -j4
>buildworld', I frequently run with load averages between 8 and 10 on one
>of my boxes at work.  Recently, I actually sat around with ps -ax for a
>bit, and found that frequently, 8 different compiler/assembler instances
>are running at once, rather than the four I expect:

The N in -jN is a relative measure of parallelism which has nothing
to do with how many processes are run.  That depends on parallism in
the Makefiles and how subdirs are entered.

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