Building Mozilla Using Gold Linker

Earlier, I saw on the Contrib Opportunities page that they wanted someone to test out the Gold Linker with the Mozilla build. Since I had to build, build, and build some more on Mozilla, I thought I might as well build it with the gold linker and test it for them. So after I've got all the necessary components installed, I tested the build with and without the gold linker on Ubuntu in my VirtualBox.

My machine is a 2.0 GHz Duo, with 4GB ram, and a 7200rpm Harddrive running Windows Vista Business edition. The profile I set for Ubuntu on VirtualBox is 1G Ram. In the .mozconfig file, I had the following settings:

   mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/../obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@
   ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
   mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
   mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE FLAGS=-j5
   ac_add_options --disable-ogg

And the build times - all from scratch - I've got was this:

With Gold Linker (2 runs)
Real 48m 03.693s    44m 57.422s
User 23m 57.074s    18m 49.275s
Sys  21m 46.282s    23m 12.551

Without Gold Linker (2 runs)
Real 42m 50.664s    47m 31.936s
User 17m 26.149s    32m 35.010s
Sys  23m 39.225s    12m 24.479s

I hope this helps Dave and Ted.