On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 10:04:11AM +0100, John Haxby wrote:
What makes you think that removing a part of the file that isn't loaded (the symbol table) is actually going to make a program run faster?
Yes, it is loaded, but unused symbols (those removed by strip) are not referenced at runtime. Most likely, it will not run faster, but it will certainly load faster, since the executable file will be smaller. It should also produce a smaller memory footprint.
Disclaimer: Note that this is just my thoughts and I have no hard
evidence that this is so.
Well, unless the ELF format has changed radically since I last looked at it the only part that the kernel actually bothers to read off the disk is the header, initialised data and executable code. It doesn't load the symbol table or debugging information. I don't have a very slow machine available -- but it would be interesting to see if there's any difference in the load speed of stripped and unstripped programs.
jch
