It seems that Sun's ld was indeed the weak link. Switching to Gnu's ld (*) brought the linking time down to just under 1 minute, both on the machine that used to take 6 minutes and on the older one that used to take 20 minutes! I don't know whether Sun's lds themselves are to blame or whether ghc/gcc generate output that suits Gnu's ld better than it does Sun's ld, but as long as ghc remains as it is, that doesn't really make a difference for our purposes. (slow) ld -V ld: Software Generation Utilities - Solaris Link Editors: 5.8-1.276 (better) ld -V ld: Software Generation Utilities - Solaris Link Editors: 5.9-1.344 (winner) ld -V GNU ld version 2.13.1 Supported emulations: elf32_sparc elf64_sparc We haven't done extensive testing yet, and earlier versions of binutils (up to and including 2.13) are reported to have problems on Solaris, so don't throw away Sun's tools, but it looks as if our case is now closed (and incremental linking isn't an issue anymore with these new link times!-) Thanks for the helpful feedback, and Good Luck with the other suspiciously slow systems! Claus (*) a little stumbling block here: gcc refers to PATH only *after* perusing its preconfigured search paths. In our case, those included /usr/ccs/bin, so we had to set GCC_EXEC_PREFIX instead (which is used before the preconfigured paths). Check with: gcc -print-search-dirs ----- Original Message ----- From: "Claus Reinke" To: Sent: Friday, November 29, 2002 12:02 PM Subject: Re: incremental linking?

...

I haven't been able to discern any pattern among those experiencing long link times so far, except that -export-dynamic flag used by the dynamic loader stuff seems to cause the linker to go off into space for a while.

We're still investigating here, but just a quick summary for our own (large) project:

- nfs doesn't seem to have too drastic effects, even in-memory disks don't speed things up, time seems to be spend in computation - on our (admittedly overloaded and dated) main Sun Server, linking could take some 20 minutes! - we've found a more modern (and not yet well-utilized;-) Sun server, bringing the time down to 6 minutes..:-(

(from that, I thought linking might have to be expensive - how naive!-)

- the same program on my rather old 366Mhz PII notebook links in about 1 minute (I didn't notice that at first, because overall compile time is longer on my notebook - but that turns out to be caused by a single generated file, for which the assembler almost chokes; after all, the notebook "only" has 192Mb memory, and the disk is crammed) - with the laptop as reference, I'd guess the problem is not ghc's fault (unless it does things drastically different on cygwin vs solaris?) - on our Suns, gcc (and hence ghc) seem to use the native linker - sunsolve lists several linker patches to address problems like "linker orders of magnitude slower than Gnu's". We seem to have those patches, but we're checking again..

moral so far: if compilation of big projects takes a long time, it is worth checking where that time is spend. for the same project, on different systems, we've got different bottlenecks:

- large (generated) files [all systems]: assembler needs an awful lot of space (not enough space->compile takes forever) - network disks: import chasing takes a lot of time - Suns (?): linking takes too long

will report again if we get better news..

Claus

PS. if we get linking times down to what seems possible, incremental linking would no longer be urgent - we'll see..

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Hi Hal,

How did you get ghc to use gld when doing --make instead of standard ld? I'm having the exact same problem you were and I'd love to make it work faster.

[Simon] might be worth adding to the docs (title: linking times on Suns, Sun's ld vs GNU ld; explanation: see previous mails)? ghc calls ld via gcc, so everything from the gcc man page about how gcc finds its tools seems to apply. It could be as easy as setting PATH so that gnu's ld is found before sun's, but as the message you quote said, the gcc installation might find the path to sun's ld first by other routes..

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(*) a little stumbling block here: gcc refers to PATH only *after* perusing its preconfigured search paths. In our case, those included /usr/ccs/bin, so we had to set GCC_EXEC_PREFIX instead (which is used before the preconfigured paths).

So we had to do something like the following (assuming sh, and gnu's binutils in /usr/local/packages): GCC_EXEC_PREFIX=/usr/local/packages/binutils/bin/ ghc-5.04 --make .. The handling of prefixes is explained for gcc's -B option in the gcc man page (here the version for our suns): -Bprefix This option specifies where to find the executables, libraries, include files, and data files of the compiler itself. The compiler driver program runs one or more of the subprograms cpp, cc1, as and ld. It tries prefix as a prefix for each program it tries to run, both with and without machine/version/. For each subprogram to be run, the compiler driver first tries the -B prefix, if any. If that name is not found, or if -B was not specified, the driver tries two standard prefixes, which are /usr/lib/gcc/ and /usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/. If neither of those results in a file name that is found, the unmodified program name is searched for using the directories specified in your PATH environment variable. The compiler will check to see if the path provided by the -B refers to a directory, and if necessary it will add a directory separator character at the end of the path. -B prefixes that effectively specify directory names also apply to libraries in the linker, because the compiler translates these options into -L options for the linker. They also apply to includes files in the preprocessor, because the compiler translates these options into -isystem options for the preprocessor. In this case, the compiler appends include to the prefix. The run-time support file libgcc.a can also be searched for using the -B prefix, if needed. If it is not found there, the two standard prefixes above are tried, and that is all. The file is left out of the link if it is not found by those means. Another way to specify a prefix much like the -B prefix is to use the environment variable GCC_EXEC_PREFIX. As a special kludge, if the path provided by -B is [dir/]stageN/, where N is a number in the range 0 to 9, then it will be replaced by [dir/]include. This is to help with boot-strapping the compiler. To see where gcc is looking, check the "programs" entry in the output of gcc -print-search-dirs and make sure your favourite ld is found first. Cheers, Claus