[RFC] Faster linking (-gsplit-dwarf, gold)

[Noel Grandin]

On 2018/06/27 12:35 AM, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
> 
> Tangential question: anybody aware of something to prevent gdb from
> trying to load _all_ symbols? The VS debugger is much more frugal
> there initially.
> 

There is low hanging fruit in the main gdb load path. It inits memory with zeros and then overwrites it. (Not 
immediately either, it zeros tons of RAM and then comes back and overwrites it later, in the most cache-unfriendly 
manner possible).
Which is a lot of time when it's loading tons of symbols.

But when I reported that to the gdb devs, I was told to recompile gdb with another allocator (jemalloc maybe?)