I was using
strace -eopen -f g++ ...
in order to see what is happening. I found the number of calls to open() were 13244 with 10880 failing. So I looked at the output and looked at one particular file from boost (noncopyable.hpp) and found that the number of calls to open this file was 18 with the last succeeding.
What are some methods for reducing this?
And yes -- this was supposed to be using precompiled headers and the matching generated file is being opened (.gch).
BTW -- the number of usages of the -I option is 3.