Suspending and resuming compile process

[Amit Uttamchandani <amit.uttam@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I have a fairly old laptop (500MHz G4) and I tend to compile a lot of
applications from source. Most of time it doesn't take too long but
when I compile large libraries or applications this sometimes takes 4-5
hours.

An example is webkitgtk+ 1.1.3. I needed this to compile the latest
version of midori. After a couple of hours of compilation, I paused the
job using Ctrl-Z and suspended my laptop to RAM. The next morning, I
resumed the laptop and typed 'fg' to resume the compile. To my
surprise, it worked fine and I was able to compile and install
webkitgtk+ successfully.

Now, I am thinking of applying this to kernel compilation, etc. Is this
common practice? Do others do this as well?

A google search did not really turn out proper topics.

Thanks,
Amit