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Typically this shows up in recursive make projects with lots of sub projects—it doesn't take that much time to stat every file in question but reinvoking make sixteen times can be quite slow.

I don't deal with this by not using make, I deal with this by not writing recursive makefiles.

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> it doesn't take that much time to stat every file in question but reinvoking make sixteen times can be quite slow.

Yes, reinvoking Make repeatedly tends to force redundant `stat` calls. But I have worked in environments where heavily-templated code was hosted over a remote filesystem, and every `stat` call was something like 10msec. That adds up _extremely_ fast, even with non-recursive make. Ugh.

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