prelink: is it worth it?

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 09:08:49AM +0100, Ron Yorston wrote:
> Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat.com> wrote:
> >Also, while prelink process has been fairly expensive some years ago, it is
> >much faster these days; if you haven't installed any rpms in the last day,
> >most of the days the cron job will just quit, if you have installed some,
> >for libraries/binaries that don't need reprelinking it will just do a quick
> >stat and nothing else, and even a full prelink takes just a minute or two.
> 
> So what got faster, prelink or hardware?
> 
> My experience, some years ago, was that a full prelink took 35-40 minutes.
> Since I didn't see any visible difference in performance I added "turn off
> prelink" to my list of things to do after installing Fedore.

Both.  prelink's C++ optimizations used to be quite time consuming,
that has been fixed, also there were changes to avoid reading all libraries
and binaries, even when those haven't changed since last prelinking and
don't need prelinking even now.

	Jakub