stripping libgcj.so.4

Sun Sep 21 09:42:00 GMT 2003

On Sunday, Sep 21, 2003, at 17:04 Pacific/Auckland, Erik Poupaert wrote:
> I was wondering, after stripping libgcj.so, its footprint went from 
> around 40 Mb to
> around 8 Mb:
>> libgcj.so.4.0.0		 39 833 506	
> libgcj-stripped.so.4.0.0 	8 125 908
>> In order to improve startup times and memory footprint, would 
> stripping libgcj affect
> the ability of an executable to produce stacktraces or so? Or would 
> there by other
> side effects?

Stripping should have very little, if any, impact on memory footprint 
and startup time as the pages containing the debug sections will not 
normally be touched. The only exception is exceptions - when libgcj 
calls addr2line to get line numbers for stack traces, it will read 
parts of the debug info. This wont cause the memory footprint of your 
Java application itself to rise, but will effect the overall resident 
memory on your machine.
All you should lose by stripping is the line number and source file 
name on stack traces. You should still get the class & method name for 
each entry in the stack trace.
There's actually a lot of redundancy in the debug info - much of the 
same information is duplicated between the debug info and gcj's class 
reflection data. One day, it might be nice to teach GDB about the 
reflection data as we could reduce the binary size a lot while 
preserving debug-ability.
Regards
Bryce.