[boost] Re: Fixing slow link times

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-10-01 17:55:19

Dave Gomboc <dave_at_[hidden]> writes:

>> Here at Transversal we recently came upon the problem of 
>> really slow link times...
> [snip]
>> ...90% of the time was 
>> spent merging the strings of debug constants...
> [snip]
>> So we hacked gcc to add a new option which disables this 
>> merging. It took our link times for our python bindings from 
>> 20mins (on a dual 1Ghz Athlon with 1G ram) to just over 4s, a 
>> 300x improvement!
>
> Specifying -fwritable-strings will cause GCC to not attempt to merge
> string literals et al.  Does that work for your situation?
>
> Yes, GCC's constant string merge algorithm is O(n^2).

Maybe we should add -fwritable-strings for GCC in Boost.Build unless
<optimization>size is set?

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com