I am using a virtual machine running openSuse 11.2. The machine is configured with 4 Gigabytes of RAM and 4 processors. I am trying to do development work on a CMake project. If I configure the project to build using Makefiles, I can issue a command like make -j4 and the code will build relatively quickly.

When I try to configure KDevelop 4 to build the same CMake project, it builds much more slowly. The suspicion is that KDevelop is building using only a single core.

What can be done that would make the project build faster in KDevelop?

Select your project. Then select menu "Project->Open Configuration...". There you can add additional make options.

you can also

export MAKEFLAGS="-j4"

or similar in a central place (e.g. in ~/.kde/env/foo.sh) to have that applied everytime you run "make".