[distcc] What's this about dlopen?

[Aaron Lehmann]

> static linking
>
>     cachegrind shows that a large fraction of client runtime is spent in the
>     dynamic linker, which is kind of a waste.  In principle using dietlibc
>     might reduce the fixed overhead of the client.  However, the nsswitch
>     functions are always dynamically linked: even if we try to produce a
>     static client it will include dlopen and eventually indirectly get libc,
>     so it's probably not practical.

I don't understand why this would be the case. I was curious, so I
linked distcc against dietlibc (I also had to link popt against it). I
got a binary that was about 1/8 the size of a statically linked distcc
using glibc. I did not see any dlopen's in the strace output, and it
appeared to run very fast (although so did the dynamically linked
version ;) ).