Idea: static builds

[Diomidis Spinellis]

Andrew Pantyukhin wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 11:03:04PM +0400, Dmitry Marakasov wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> I just have an idea that may be useful: static port builds. This can
>> help produce packages without any depends, which may be useful
>> sometimes.
> 
> What I'd like to see first is some quantitative research on the
> benefits of it. Static builds are a lot more headache than one
> could imagine from a number points of view.

I can give you quantitative data on the benefits of shared objects.  On 
a web server running FreeBSD 6.2 I found 98 shared objects sharing 
16,790,901 bytes of memory through 1,002 mappings.
Without shared libraries the corresponding binaries would require 
198,815,270 bytes - an order of magnitude more.

On freefall I found 58 shared objects sharing 11,285,262 bytes of memory 
through 2,127 mappings. Without shared libraries the corresponding 
binaries would require 515,107,268 bytes - 50 times more.

These are not just memory savings, but, more importantly on a modern 
system, they contribute to improved locality in the code cache.

I've put the Perl script I used for obtaining these figures at 
http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20071006/


Diomidis Spinellis - dds@