All the comments here are great. One other suggestion I didn’t see: use chrt to start the build process with the sched_batch policy. It’s lower than sched_other, which most processes will be in, so the compilation processes should be bumped off the CPU for virtually everyone else
My college group actually talked about this 20 years ago v the name we came up with: The Uniburn. Portmanteau of unibrow and sideburn