93650 - Use objprelink to speedup Mozilla launch speed

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: Build Config, enhancement)

Description

[Chris]

Folowing the discussions on the KDE mailing lists, it seems that the c++ .o
pre-processor tool 'objprelink' has a significant performance benifit. Reports
show that Konqueror startup time was reduced by 50% (!). 

The tool's page has the folowing description:

What is objprelink?

This hack was inspired by a paper by Waldo Bastian. Program objprelink runs
after the C++ compiler and before the C++ linker. It transforms the .o files and
tries to replace expensive relocations by cheaper ones. This eventually requires
less work from the dynamical loader and provides for faster startups in large
C++ applications.

How much faster?

The dynamic loading time for application konqueror is reduced by 50%. I tried
but was unable to obtain better results by enabling lazy linking on the i386.
Yet this can be really snappy when the the pages are buffered. Konqueror's
start-up time is now caused by disk accesses. This means that the dynamical
loading time is no longer the bottleneck.



This might be a nice thing to try to intergrate into the Linux builds ? Startup
speed is one of the few hangups i still have with mozilla (as of 0.9.3).

Comment 1

[cls]

Reassigning to Roger C who seems to handle performance issues.

Comment 2

[Roger Chickering]

I was, but not anymore.  On to Cathleen.

I'm not too optimistic about this particular change for Mozilla,
because Mozilla's start-up time is already dominated by disk
access (for cold start).  But it's definitely worth trying!

-Roger

Comment 3

[Chris]

Closing bug. Been open and idle for a long time, and gcc 3.1 and to be released
glibc should address a lot of the issues with c++ objects.

Comment 4

[Jon Granrose]

verified invalid.

Comment 5

[Jon Granrose]

actually marking this time.