particularly help programs which load many shared libraries with
a lot of relocations. Large C++ programs such as are found in KDE
are a prime example.
While relocating a shared object, maintain a vector of symbols
which have already been looked up, directly indexed by symbol
number. Typically, symbols which are referenced by a relocation
entry are referenced by many of them. This is the same optimization
I made to the a.out dynamic linker in 1995 (rtld.c revision 1.30).
Also, compare the first character of a sought-after symbol with its
symbol table entry before calling strcmp().
On a PII/400 these changes reduce the start-up time of a typical
KDE program from 833 msec (elapsed) to 370 msec.
MFC after: 5 days
c15e7faad5