prelink: is it worth it?

[Seth Vidal]

On Thu, 9 Jul 2009, Matthew Miller wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 07:55:38AM -0700, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
>> hot disk cache to be fair).  The number of cycles for total startup is
>> representative of the win.
>
> I'm not sure that's the case. If I can get a 50% speed up to a program's
> startup times, that sounds great, but if I then leave that program running
> for days on end, I haven't actually won very much at all -- but I still pay
> the price continuously. (That price being: fragility, verifiability, and of
> course the prelinking activity itself.)
>
>> Note, also small but frequently used apps benefit.  I run gcc etc a lot
>> and like every single saved cycle.
>
> Right, this actually seems more significant to me, even though it may be
> less important in terms of marketing to new Linux desktop users. But
> saving every last possible cycle is only one concern of many, particularly
> when deciding on a default configuration.
>

Is there a middle road which involves having prelink target specific 
pkgs/binaries and avoid others?

-sv