On Tue, 2002-02-12 at 22:20, Frederic Tessier wrote: > We are not familiar with the intricate workings of the compiler, > but this must have to do with an alignment problem when the > executable is launched, as the changes typically occur when the > name length is increased by 8 bytes. This is a serious bug since > in our simple example it more than doubles the execution time > when we choose a "bad" name!
Yes, this is almost certainly the cause of the problem. The name of the program is pushed onto the stack to form argv[0]. On i386 platforms, there is a significant performance penalty if doubles are not 8-byte aligned in memory. I think the glibc in woody aligns the stack properly at program startup to avoid this issue. p.