Oh my. This makes a real difference! These timings are just for libstdc++, on an 800Mhz Athlon. time make all 248.736u 26.373s 4:59.60 91.8% 0+0k 0+0io 503943pf+0w time make CXXFLAGS="--param ggc-min-heapsize=8192" all 214.521u 27.306s 4:10.44 96.5% 0+0k 0+0io 512759pf+0w -benjamin