improving ld performance

[Andy Chittenden]

I've been experimenting with changing the DEFAULT_SIZE of hash table in
bfd/hash.c and got significant improvements in LD CPU times when linking one
of our images (see below). I was wondering whether I can set this from the
command line or linker script? (I can't see any options but I could well
have missed it). FYI I'm running CVS version of code (ie head as of earlier
today).

4051 (original setting)

# time y
GNU ld version 2.15.90 20040304
  Supported emulations:
   elf32ppc
   elf32ppclinux
   elf32ppcsim

real    1m50.436s
user    0m40.013s
sys     0m6.600s

8599:

# time y
GNU ld version 2.15.90 20040304
  Supported emulations:
   elf32ppc
   elf32ppclinux
   elf32ppcsim

real    1m41.236s
user    0m29.703s
sys     0m6.407s

16699:

# time y
GNU ld version 2.15.90 20040304
  Supported emulations:
   elf32ppc
   elf32ppclinux
   elf32ppcsim

real    1m38.939s
user    0m25.302s
sys     0m6.686s

Beyond this, I don't see any improvement.

-- 
Andy, BlueArc Engineering