Why is the startup of an App on linux slower when using shared libs?

Question

On the embedded device I\'m working on, the startup time is an important issue. The whole application consists of several executables that use a set of libraries. Because space

Answer 1

Bacause shared libraries have to be linked to at runtime, usually by dlopen() or something similar. There's no such step for static libraries.

Edit: some more detail. dlopen has to perform the following tasks.

• Find the shared library
• Load it into memory
• Recursively load all dependencies (and their dependencies....)
• Resolve all symbols

This requires quite a lot of IO operations to accomplish.

In a statically linked program all of the above is done at compile time, not runtime. Therefore it's much faster to load a statically linked program.

In your case, the difference is exaggerated by the relatively slow hardware your code has to run on.