The -xthroughput option tells the compiler that the application will be run in situations where many processes are simultaneously running on the system
If -xthroughput=yes, the compiler will favor optimizations that slightly reduce performance for a single process while improving the amount of work achieved by all the processes on the system. As an example, the compiler might choose to be less aggressive in prefetching data. Such a choice would reduce the memory bandwidth consumed by the process, and as such the process may run slower, but it would also leave more memory bandwidth to be shared among other processes.
The default is -xthroughput=no.