Shared Libraries

[Joe Picone]

I would like to know what good/bad experiences users have had with shared
libraries? Are they appropriate for a research environment using C++ that
consists of lots of single user workstations and a central compute server?
Any serious performance hits? (Obviously, there are benefits at the OS
level for commonly-used commands.)

I currently have a set of 10 libraries distributed something like this:

	Size:   205896        Heavy	(All programs)
	Size:    97576 		^
	Size:   732310 		|
	Size:   145356 		|
	Size:    45406 	      Usage
	Size:   668680 		|
	Size:   117300 		|
	Size:    46164 		|
	Size:    83052 		v
	Size:   125960 	      Light	(Few programs)

and about  100 utilities that  are run  infrequently  (a few times per
day).  It seems to me the  main benefit is  to put  heavily  used stuff in
a shared library and leave  the other stuff  in a standard library. I am
worried about large programs having  to resolve hundreds of references at
run-time and requiring a long time to startup and  large amounts of
memory.

Regards,
Joe Picone  ("The Terminal Man")
Arpanet Address: JP at CSC.TI.COM