Is pre-linking worth it? [LWN.net]

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 15, 2009 21:34 UTC (Wed) by leonb (guest, #3054)
Parent article: Is pre-linking worth it?

Although my "objprelink" program has long been obsolete,
its web page <http://objprelink.sourceforge.net/> explains
in detail why the c++ abi breaks the classic tricks used by
dynamical loaders to speed up the startup times. It also
discusses and benchmarks methods that can improve the situation,
including (section 6) a brief discussion of the "prelink" program,
including its ability to improve the memory usage.
Prelinking was still very experimental in 2002.

The conclusion was simple methods (now used by everyone)
were sufficient to make the load-time linking time small in
comparison with the KDE3 application startup time.
Large speedups should be found elsewhere.

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Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 15, 2009 22:44 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (7 responses)

> Large speedups should be found elsewhere.
I somehow feel that after the impressive work done on kernel boot times, this should be the next candidate. Booting to a desktop with firefox, oo.o and gimp running in 15 seconds - that would be something to impress people with... although right now I don't quite believe in it.

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 15, 2009 22:48 UTC (Wed) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link] (6 responses)

why?

we already have that working.... on a laptop.

OOo on a netbook is a bit painful still.

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 15, 2009 22:56 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (5 responses)

Wow. On my decently powered laptop, firefox feels like it needs a minute to start (maybe it does, I should time it). I hope others learn from what you have achieved!

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 16, 2009 0:47 UTC (Thu) by etrusco (guest, #4227) [Link] (3 responses)

It probably does.
While you're at it, create a new profile and time its startup too; but don't ask me why the difference...

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 16, 2009 4:17 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

You can get some speed back by doing a "vacuum" on your Firefox profile's sqlite tables.

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 23, 2009 21:37 UTC (Thu) by ariveira (guest, #57833) [Link]

Yep;

for f in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $f 'VACUUM;'; done

from time to time

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 16, 2009 5:00 UTC (Thu) by bvdm (guest, #42755) [Link]

Apparently NSS runs through your cache to seed its random number generator. May be something like that.. o_O

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 16, 2009 10:54 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

On my decently powered laptop, firefox feels like it needs a minute to start

Yes. But that's largely because the Firefox developers are clueless and have built a bloated monster. I'm no Opera fanboy, but I have to admire the fact that it launches in 3 seconds from a cold cache. FWIW, Firefox managed to completely outdo itself on my decently powered home desktop last night, taking 14 minutes from invocation to first window appearing. Yes, I kept checking the process table to see that it really was there and trying to start. Yes, the machine was running slowly due to other activity on the box. But still, even under normal conditions, it takes a minute or so to launch, and this is a 3GHz machine with plenty of RAM. That's just insane...