rtld optimizations

[Gary Jennejohn]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:40:13 -0500
John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Wednesday, January 26, 2011 10:25:27 am Mark Felder wrote:
> > On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:49:11 -0600, Alexander Kabaev <kabaev at gmail.com>  
> > wrote:
> > 
> > >  The only extra quirk that said commit
> > > does is an optimization of a dlsym() call, which is hardly ever in
> > > critical performance path.
> > 
> > It's really not my place to say, but it seems strange that if an  
> > optimization is available people would ignore it because they don't think  
> > it's important enough. I don't understand this mentality; if it's not  
> > going to break anything and it obviously can improve performance in  
> > certain use cases, why not merge it and make FreeBSD even better?
> 
> Many things that seem obvious aren't actually true, hence the need for
> actual testing and benchmarks.
> 

I can't claim to have rigorously benchmarked this, but I am running with
a patched ld-elf.so.1 right now and can state that *subjectively* there
is absolutely no difference in the perceived performance.

firefox, opera and OpenOffice still seem to be dogs the first time they
start up.

Since this is all about perception I see no benefit in applying the
patch, although it doesn't seem to have broken anything either.

-- 
Gary Jennejohn (gj@)