[Bug binutils/2467] "ar q" gives quadratic memory use

[dcoutts at gentoo dot org]

------- Additional Comments From dcoutts at gentoo dot org  2006-03-17 00:46 
-------
I tried using the 'S' modifier which did make adding archive members faster (by
not building the symbol index). However it also missed members out for some
reason which I have not figured out yet.

Further tests revel that it is most likely that it is the ranlib / ar s part
that is taking so long. I wrote a little program (100loc) to create GNU ar
archives without the symbol table (which unsprisingly is very quick). Then
running ranlib on this archive still took 500Mb for a short time near the end of
the run.

This problem with ranlib/ar memory consumption is made worse by the fact that we
have to use xargs and invoke ar multiple times if we have a large number of
archive members. This is of course because of restrictions on the size of
command line arguments. When using "... | xargs ar q libfoo.a" we end up
re-generating the symbol index multiple times (eg about 10 for the ghc
libHSbase.a case). If ar supported -input then this would be better.

-- 


http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2467

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