Making development run more efficiently

I have a somewhat decent machine (2.6 i7, 16 GB RAM) but running `npm run dev` consistently utilizes upwards of 1.5 full cores.

Are there any steps that I can take to reduce CPU load as well as decrease the save-and-compile time? I've worked on other react projects using similar stacks that didn't seem to be nearly as resource intensive. Thanks

Edit: I was able to cut down my webpack compile time significantly using the advice in this thread https://github.com/erikras/react-redux-universal-hot-example/issues/616.