TDR says:
>In particular, a shared library caching problem isn't
>quite solved yet, and that has an affect.

To work around this slowness I timed a make of the GENERIC kernel.
With the distributed (g)cc loader assembler and make program, all dyn-linked,
the process took ~2500 seconds on my IPC with 12 MBytes of RAM.
Relinking gcc and gas as static binaries reduced the time to ~1350 seconds.
Relinking make and gld reduced it to ~1250 seconds.

So I figured my working set of long run tools: gcc, gas, gld, make, XSun.
Then, I installed the statically linked version in /usr/*.

System feels _much_ better now.  Programs that use the parts of the
library that I am wont to poke around in have such short run-times
that I don't notice, and the tools that I use to make the changes are
much faster now, all for only a small cost in disk space, < 10MBytes.

-sam