shared library loading performance and prelinking

[Robert Schweikert <rjschwei at cox dot net>]

Hi all,

I have a question about library load performance. We have a large
application that has 125 shared libraries and a very large number of
symbols, lots of them from C++ code. One of the issue we are having is
application start up. Not all libraries are loaded at start up. Most
libraries are loaded while the user interacts with the program.

Since loading is an issue I have been trying to learn about the issues
that go along with shared object loading on Linux. One thing that we are
trying is to use export lists as suggested in Ulrich's paper. We are
still having some problems with it but that's a topic for another post.

In my search for answers I have run across prelinking and I was trying
to figure out how it works and what it will do for me as far as load
performance is concerned. Everything I found said the feature is
available only in glivc 2.3.x, thus I am waiting for RedHat 8.1 since
earlier distributions still have glibc 2.2.x. Anyway, can someone give
me an idea what is happening when prelinking is used, what kind of
performance gains one can expect and how to use the prelinking feature?

Help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Robert