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I wonder about the impact of incremental linking on the execution speed of a program.

I know that incremental linking adds padding between functions and data which leads to bigger executables and in certain cases probably to speed impact through less optimal cache usage. Microsoft's documentation also states that it may add jump thunks to handle relocation of functions. But there is not word about speed.

Has anybody an idea about the speed impact or even did some measurements?

ElektroKraut
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    The only impact that comes to mind is that the executable will be larger and therefore might take more time to load from disk at start up. Since the disk allocation units are fairly large these days I would guess a lot of extra data is loaded at startup anyway. So my WAG is that the impact is very minimal – Jay Oct 04 '12 at 14:21
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    Under normal circumstances, your release build is going to be a clean build. Incremental linking is only for developers. Even QA gets the release build. – MSalters Oct 05 '12 at 07:48
  • Possible duplicate of [build system performance impact of gcc linking to unused libraries](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26747187/build-system-performance-impact-of-gcc-linking-to-unused-libraries) – Paul Sweatte Jan 21 '17 at 01:24

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