Re: Prebinding for DragonFly/FreeBSD-4

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

:Okay, see at [1] an updated version of the patch. Now features hashing
:of the symbol table and asm-optimized hashing for i386
:
:cheers
:  simon
:
:[1]: http://chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de/~corecode/prebind.diff
 
    Looking better.  

    I've patched it in and run some tests.  As expected, programs which link
    only libc do not show much improvement... 100 fork/exec's of /usr/bin/od
    took 0.66 seconds instead of 0.77 seconds on my test box.  In otherwords,
    6.6ms per exec rather then 7.7ms.

    More substantial programs showed some improvement.  'convert' (from
    the ImageMagic port), which uses 15 shared libraries, was able to do
    100 fork/exec's on my EPIA test box in 3.82 seconds instead
    of 6.09 seconds.  Still, the difference is only 38ms of overhead verses
    60ms of overhead per exec.

    I think the code in the patch is excellent, but I am not convinced that
    prebinding is worth doing.  Are there arguments for doing
    the prebinding other then performance?  Maybe someone could measure
    startup times for something huge, like KDE, with and without prebinding.

						-Matt