prelink: is it worth it?

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 11:08:20AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 07:55:38AM -0700, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> > hot disk cache to be fair).  The number of cycles for total startup is
> > representative of the win.
> 
> I'm not sure that's the case. If I can get a 50% speed up to a program's
> startup times, that sounds great, but if I then leave that program running
> for days on end, I haven't actually won very much at all -- but I still pay
> the price continuously. (That price being: fragility, verifiability, and of
> course the prelinking activity itself.)

Most of GNOME apps link against 50+ libraries, however small they are, many
of them are executed frequently.

Also, while prelink process has been fairly expensive some years ago, it is
much faster these days; if you haven't installed any rpms in the last day,
most of the days the cron job will just quit, if you have installed some,
for libraries/binaries that don't need reprelinking it will just do a quick
stat and nothing else, and even a full prelink takes just a minute or two.

	Jakub