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

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 16, 2009 4:35 UTC (Thu) by arjan (subscriber, #36785)
In reply to: Is pre-linking worth it? by nix
Parent article: Is pre-linking worth it?

this wasn't a test program; it was a whole OS boot + login into the UI/desktop.

Is pre-linking worth it?

Posted Jul 23, 2009 16:57 UTC (Thu) by jgg (subscriber, #55211) [Link]

I've got similar results from some of my embedded work too. prelinking saves about 3-5% of system ram in my cases because it prevents paging in of the relocation and symbol tables, and it doesn't dirty as many pages in the shared libraries.

20% doesn't seem that surprising to me, glibc for instance has 50k you have to load just to do symbol resolution. You'd only need to fault in 250k of text from glibc to get to 20% overhead. Even my desktop has only faulted in 224kb of glibc.