in reply to
Huge perl binary file
Certainly the old one was dynamically linked while the new one is at least partly static. The difference is that when loading the dynamic one the OS recognizes that there is a whole bunch of code from libraries missing and proceeds to load these first and resolve all the missing symbols in the binary. The libraries need to be found on the file system, opened, they in turn may require more libraries, and the whole dynamic linking process takes time as well. So while static linking may waste a bit of disk (completely negligible today) and RAM (usually negligible) its binaries are usually slightly faster to start.