Programming Tools Guide
Chapter 14, Shared libraries

Exclude infrequently used routines

Exclude infrequently used routines

Putting infrequently used routines in a shared library can degrade performance, particularly on paging systems. Traditional a.out files contain all code they need at run time. The code in an a.out file is related to the process. Therefore, if a process calls a function, it may already be in memory because of its proximity to other text in the process. See also ``Organize to improve locality''.