Lazy binding of virtual table entries?

[Antti Kerola]

We have problems with slow application startup.

We have a rather large application, about 2 million lines of code, in about 
80 shared libraries.
I have found out with LD_DEBUG that relocation of virtual table entries in 
the shared libraries takes
place at the start up. This is now taking several seconds.  According to 
LD_DEBUG, all the
other function bindings are performed lazily.

- Is there a way to bind also the virtual table entries lazily?
- Alternatively, is there a way to prelink the executable so that the 
virtual table entries
are resolved at link time without linking the whole app statically to one 
huge binary?

We are using Solaris 2.8 on Sparc with gcc 3.3.2 configured for gnu ld and 
gnu as.
Our binutils version is 2.13.2.1. We are prepared to consider updating our 
tool set to
resolve this problem, though.

We are compiling with -fPIC. There are no other switches affecting code 
generation.

There is some background information below

Each module in a library typically defines a new class which is derived 
from one of our
base classes. Base classes may have almost 100 methods so we end up having
a virtual table referencing to these base class methods in each application 
module.

The executable has no objects of its own. It is just a bunch of shared 
libraries linked together.

Antti