On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 12:09:59PM -0700, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> And any benchmarks or analysis of performance (startup and running) of
> executables and libraries with and without the various symbols (including
> debugging)?
> 
> Greg Woods mentioned in some posting that some extra symbols didn't make
> any difference in the runtime memory usage. But I am looking for more
> details and explanation.

The runtime difference is not measureable. The difference is that
the kernel and the dynamic linker has to iterate over less sections
(which is relatively cheap) and select less sections for actual
memory mapping. Since both kernel and rtld ignore debug symbol tables,
it doesn't make the executables faster or bigger (in-memory usage).

Joerg