hi. preload and prelink are NOT the same thing. preload is a daemon that scan what file you load into memory the most (in learning mode). and later (in operating mode), it prefetches them. I can't say if there is a difference as it's been a long time I use it. a slight improvement may be at the start of my desktop. prelink modifies binary and library to ... prelink ;-) them. during the days of kde 3 I noticed a significant improvement in loading time of applications. I have dropped its use (prelink ... and kde3) because some recent binutils(or gcc or i don't remember) feature is supposed to do almost the same thing [ref. needed] but you can still see improvement. i used to run prelink on the gimp's plugin and it make gimp starts very fast as if it was a second run whereas it was a first run. on disadvantage of prelink is that it modifies your binaries and libraries. so if you want to check for integrety of files by comparing them to the files in the package, you're screwed. that's why i droppped prelink recently. but you can still revert the prelink and it will give you back your binaries and libraries as they were. i did not modify much prelink.conf. just add /opt directoy there if it is not. you can add some directory. you can run it with prelink -amR in a cron job. this is certainly good for your archlinux. it's standard linux software. you can even use the 2 at the same time !
