On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote: > At 14:42 4/29/2003 +0200, you wrote: > >Prelinking is done with "/usr/sbin/prelink". Prelinking optimizes > >binaries and shared libraries so that programs usually will start up > >faster. > > Surely there is a downside to this somewhere...? The downsides I can think of off hand are 1. The prelinked situation isn't as well tested as the non-prelinked situation, so there is more potential for bugs. 2. prelinking changes some critical library files, so if something goes wrong while you are prelinking, eg. the system crashes, your system could be toast. 3. I have seen reports, possibly on this list, where people claim prelinking has actually slowed bits of their system. The common factor in these reports seems to be that KDE is used (and I believe a key library in KDE is unprelinkable), and they have compared the speed of applications which use dlopen or similar to load libraries, which means that prelinking doesn't help. Michael Young
