Travis's OS X resources for open source projects seem to be insufficient, so OS X jobs are very slow and seem to be falling further and further behind. Therefore, library authors are encouraged to keep the OS X jobs to the minimum necessary. Spawning many OS X jobs takes hours (~25 minutes waiting time per job at a quick estimate). On a not entirely unrelated note, Rene Rivera has added a new feature <cxxstd> to Boost.Build that controls the C++ standard in use. So for instance, instead of the old b2 libs/mylib/test toolset=gcc cxxflags=-std=c++11 one can now use b2 libs/mylib/test toolset=gcc cxxstd=11 In addition to being more convenient, this also allows several invocations to be combined into one: b2 libs/mylib/test toolset=clang cxxstd=03,11,14,1z which can be leveraged to cut down on the number of jobs. An example of using cxxstd in .travis.yml can be seen here: https://github.com/boostorg/system/blob/develop/.travis.yml