LD being resource hungry while trying to achieve maximal dead-code elimination

[Marco van de Voort]

I'm using FPC (www.freepascal.org), which has a mode (called smartlinking)
that tries to achieve maximal (or at least several magnitudes more optimal)
dead-code elimination by creating archives that contain a compilation unit
per symbol.

While this works fine in general, LD's memory usage is a becoming a problem.

The memory usage is roughly 100-200 times the size of the generated binary,
is there any somewhat easy way (small mods and recompiling inclusive) to
decrease this?

P.s. if people argue that this method is a dirty hack, I fully agree.
Another way to achieve the same result would be appreciated. The hack is
probably introduced years ago, maybe there is a better way meanwhile.