I honestly have no clue how much extra memory this would cost. I can see it being a big issue on embedded systems. But, with 512 megs being considered very low on modern desktop/server systems, I always thought the vast majority of recent memory use was data rather than code.

Roughly how many processes are you running? Can anyone give a wild-assed guess how much memory it take to boot and load gmail in FireFox on a statically linked Linux?

You shouldn't see that much difference, at least on a system designed for static linking (modern GNU/Linux is explicitly not such a system, see http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/no_static_linking.html). There's still quite a bit of potential for interprocess resource-sharing.

If you somehow managed to get a statically linked Firefox (I think it would be very difficult, given the degree to which Drepper has abandoned the idea) on a modern Linux system, though, the resource usage would admittedly probably be quite impressive.

You'd need a bigger hard drive rather than more memory: dynamically shared libraries are paged-in to be used just as statically linked libraries are and are also paged-out when not in use, in just the same way.

Thus, to run a dynamically linked program you need to use the same amount of memory as you would a statically linked program.

However, if you are lucky (or have enough RAM), there is a chance that you won't have to load the page containing the library as it may already be in memory.

So there is a valid argument that to take full advantage of dynamically linked libraries you need more memory than for statically linked libraries.