[davidp]

> it takes some time to dynamically load a library into an address space. There are tables that may need to be walked and updated with correct pointers

True, but I'd expect that to be dwarfed by the I/O time required to load even a single 4k page from disk, vs. keeping one copy of a big dynamic library like glibc loaded for the whole system, with fixups done per-process.

Good points about ASLR and static-linking frequently-exec'd-and-exited processes like the shell; and certainly for embedded and HPC it makes sense. I guess the moral, as always, is to measure.

[prewett]

A lot of those pages will already be in the file cache (assuming his use case of small utilities running frequently). Anyway, it should be easy to test: since glibc will always be in memory, any differences in timing between the static and dynamic version should be those alleged loading costs.