On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 06:41:59AM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote: > On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 11:23:20AM +0100, Andrew Haley wrote: > > Joe Buck writes: > > > Richard Henderson showed that the libjava build spends 2/3 of its time > > > in libtool, and that his hand-hacked (but not portable) modification to > > > invoke the appropriate binutils commands directly gave a huge speedup. > > > > Yes, but please bear in mind that this *only* happens when you have a > > machine with huge RAM. For other people with small RAM, the link > > itself is an important factor. Also, other people have found that the > > libtool script consumes a smaller part of total execution time: rth's > > measurements are at one extreme of the scale. > > We have been working on linker speed. If you have a number to show > that the GNU linker is very slow on certain things, I will take a > look.
I'm glad you're looking at speeding up the linker. Please make sure to look at memory consumption as well, since performance falls off a cliff once the working set exceeds physical memory. A good test would be to bootstrap gcc on a machine with 256M, or that is artificially limited to 256M (I seem to recall that you can tell a Linux kernel you have only a given amount of memory).
