Improving program startup with fastbind [HP-UX Linker] White paper

Abstract

On HP-UX Integrity, all application programs are linked to shared libraries. During the startup of each

such program, the dynamic loader spends a significant amount of time in searching symbols. This

document describes a way to avoid this cost and improve program startup performance using the

fastbind(1) and prebind(1) tools.

Intended audience

This document is intended for developers and users (including system administrators) of applications

on HP-UX Integrity systems.

Terms and definitions

The following table lists the terms and definitions used in this document.

Terms

Definitions

Load module A loadable unit of the program with text and/or data segments that can be

directly mapped into memory.

Dynamic loader The dynamic loader (dld.so) is the user-space runtime component that handles

the loading of shared libraries and resolving symbol references amongst load

modules.

Multi-process

model

A client-server application model where programs work as servlets that are

executed many times a second to process once for each incoming client request.

Prerequisites

This document assumes some basic knowledge of:

 Executables and shared libraries

 Shared library search paths

 Software products and related commands on HP-UX

Related information

For more information, see the following documents:

 dld.so(5) man page

 fastbind(1) man page

 prebind(1) man page

 HP-UX linker and libraries user's guide

See the HP-UX linker web page for a list of product documentation:

http://www.hp.com/go/linker