what does ldconfig do ?
 

hi all,
this is quite a newbie question - what exactly does ldconfig do at boot time ? I mean, can I safely turn it off ? I'm asking this because the really zippy booting speed of slack can bew made even faster if I remove the ldconfig part.
Thanks in advance!!

You wouldn't want to do that. ldconfig rebuilds the searchpath for libraries that you add to your installation, taking it's input from /etc/ld.so.conf.

man ldconfig


You dont need it, but if you install new programs frequently, you want it to run at boot.


It is always manually runable though.

ldconfig is one of the most useful things to have on your system. It basically caches libs so that your programs with shared libs don't have to search the filesystem tree everytime they are run. Don't disable this, the wait time at boot is well worth the service it provides.

U may make the booting process a little bit faster, if u look at /etc/rc.d
Those with the file permission -rwx?????? will be executed during the intit process, sow just whether u need /etc/rc.d/rc.{sshd,sendmaild,httpd,nfsd}.

Just chmod 644 rc.modul-you-don't-need, not only make the booting process faster but also reduse the usage of resources (cpu,ram). All server/demon run in loops, that mean they consume CPU cycles all the time not like application ..

thanks for the load of info fellas - guess I'll just leave ldconfig alone

Just FYI
 

This is an old thread, but I figured I'd post this just in case someone finds it on google, like I did, and gets confused by the post at the end.
Running daemons uses some RAM, certainly. But the bit about is just about entirely wrong; in fact servers spend most of their time waiting on select() and consuming essentially no cycles. Then again, most graphical programs spend most of their time waiting on select() and consuming essentially no cycles, too; it's just a matter of what they're waiting for. Anyway, the point is that daemons that are idle are consuming essentially nothing. The idea of "blocking" on events is as old as UNIX, and one of the great things about it.

Personally I removed ldconfig from bootup and added it to cron to run at 2am every day. This way I don't have to sit through it at boot but it still runs at a hour I could care less what my system is doing :)

I set mine to run every time I shutdown... could care less how long that takes...