Shared libraries [LWN.net]

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 28, 2025 11:01 UTC (Fri) by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
In reply to: Shared libraries by farnz
Parent article: APT Rust requirement raises questions

That can only happen if you somehow have a system that is both incredibly busy, but also incredibly idle, so that resources are fully saturated and things get aggressively evicted from the page cache, but somehow the system is completely static otherwise. IE, you need to go out of your way to artificially create such a situation. On a normal, busy Linux systems with socket activated services, timer activated services, dbus activated services, etc etc, there are pretty much always processes being started and stopped. If new processes are started so _rarely_ that you don't even have glibc in the page cache, then obviously starting processes is not a bottleneck and it doesn't matter anyway one way or the other.

I'm not really sure why you are trying to conjure up such a contrived and unlikely example just to prove a point? It's not really working

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Shared libraries

Posted Nov 28, 2025 11:08 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

No - it happens when the system is continuously busy, but new process starting is on the "once every 15 minutes" scale, not "every few seconds".

And I do have glibc in the page cache - I just don't have the stuff that's only loaded on process starting in cache.

But I get it, my experience and yours don't match, so you're going to tell me I'm wrong, rather than address a real situation.

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 28, 2025 13:40 UTC (Fri) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (2 responses)

I think that even if it does happen on some specially built devices with some very specific workloads, it would be counterproductive to optimise for that and make the common case slower for everyone else in the world instead.

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 29, 2025 20:53 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

But we still need to support obsolete hardware!

FWIW, static binaries help with responsiveness for most users. I encourage everyone here to try the fully static distro that I mentioned ( . It really feels more snappy.

Shared libraries

Posted Nov 29, 2025 22:08 UTC (Sat) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

It's not "obsolete", it's just custom built. And it does work just fine with shared libraries for most workloads except whatever weird thing farnz is doing with it.

Feeling more snappy at 2 minutes after boot doesn't necessarily mean it's more snappy 5 days later.