There's a bug in binutils that causes ld to link very slowly with lots of object files compiled with -g. (In my case, it takes a link that should take under a minute almost 10 minutes, which makes development rather unpleasant.) The bug occurs in binutils-2.16.1-r3 and binutils-2.17, and is fixed by binutils-2.17.50.0.9. The bug is reported upstream at <http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3111>. Any chance the fix could be back-ported to binutils-2.16 or even binutils-2.17? Note: the bug is not present in binutils-2.15, but because glibc-2.4 requires binutils-2.16, it was not possible for me to downgrade. However, portage let me downgrade, but then gcc couldn't link anything. (If you find yourself in that position, you can temporarily edit /usr/src/lib.so, removing "AS_NEEDED ( /lib/ld-linux.so.2 )", to allow re-emerging binutils-2.16.)
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 163135 ***
Dupe.
