[Bug ld/22831] ld causes massive thrashing if object files are not fully memory-resident: new algorithm needed

[amodra at gmail dot com]

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22831

--- Comment #34 from Alan Modra <amodra at gmail dot com> ---
I'll note that the priority and severity fields in bugzilla are primarily for
the use of maintainers, or at least that should be the way they are treated. 
They are not for bug reporters to say "this bug is really, really important!" 
That said, I've experienced exactly the pain you ran into with a machine
swapping like crazy, in fact it used to happen to me quite regularly.  And some
things we do, like trying to free memory before exit to pacify people crying
"memory leak!" only make things worse when you run into swap.  I had one link
take 30 minutes extra just freeing memory..

In putting the severity at "enhancement" I'm merely reflecting reality.  Using
more memory than necessary is not a bug, at least not until you run out of
memory.  Even with ideal memory usage you will always be able to generate a
workload that is just too big to handle.

And "new algorithm needed" is really saying "rewrite the linker".  That's low
priority.  Also, there are other linkers, eg. gold and lld, that are much newer
than ld.bfd.  They don't do much better at memory usage, do they?

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