[DougMerritt]

I remember, but these days the parallel to working set size (depending on the app) is fitting things in cache, or at least cache-awareness -- which some people aim for, but is largely an ignored issue. Page thrashing versus cache thrashing.

An issue both back then and today is potentially that dynamic linkage often ends up using an indirection table, unlike static linkage with simple fixups, which then adds at least the cost of an indirection to each function call.

Sometimes that overhead is swamped by other factors, sometimes it's not, but that would be one reason why static linkage can be faster at times.

Dlopen() is certainly a lifesaver sometimes.

[justincormack]

Plus you can inline stuff with static linking.

[geminitojanus]

Whole program optimization is really the killer feature for static linking today. It's possible with dynamic linking, but a static compiler can really go to town shedding weight since lots of libraries have common code structures (see every sufficiently complex C library and its own implementations of various data structures).