Darryl Gove's blog
Libraries (3) - Application startup costs
As can be seen from the previous graphs, even a simple application (like ssh) can pull in a fair number of libraries. Whenever a library is pulled in, the linker has to request memory, load the image from disk, and then link in all the routines. This effort takes time - it's basically a large chunk of the start up time of an application. If you profile the start up of an application, you'll probably not see much because much of this time is basically the OS/disk activity of mapping the libraries into memory.
Of course applications also have start up costs associated with initialising data structures etc. However, the biggest risk is that applications will pull in libraries that they don't need, or perhaps do need, but don't need yet. The best work-around for this is to lazy load the libraries. Of course it's fairly easy to write code that either breaks under lazy loading or breaks lazy loading. It's not hard to work around these issues with care, and doing so can have a substantial impact on start up time.
Posted at 02:01PM May 20, 2009 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
