# Wild Linker Slows Down in New Benchmarks

> Wild linker now lags behind Mold in key benchmarks after recent updates
- Title: Wild Linker Slows Down in New Benchmarks · Github | Shortify
- Summary: Wild linker now lags behind Mold in key benchmarks after recent updates Wild linker performs slower than Mold in new benchmarks due to filesystem and…
- Keywords: wild, mold, linker, benchmark, ext4, tmpfs, fork, clang-release, ubuntu, asahi-linux, threadripper, ryzen
- Source: Github — https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2026/09/18/benchmarking-wild-vs-mold.html
- Published: 2026-09-18T00:00:00+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: wild, mold, linker, benchmark, ext4, tmpfs, fork, clang-release, ubuntu, asahi-linux, threadripper, ryzen
## New Benchmarks Released
Mold updated benchmarks including Wild for the first time, showing Wild substantially slower than Mold compared to August 4th results.
## Key Configuration Differences
Mold deletes output files between runs on ext4, while Wild historically used tmpfs to reduce noise.
## Benchmark Results Comparison
Wild runs 2.23 seconds for blender-debug versus Mold's 1.79 seconds, a 1.2x slower rate.
## Filesystem Impact
Wild performs best on tmpfs with forking, but Mold uses ext4 for better real-world performance.
## Why Wild Slowed Down
Wild lacks OS-specific tweaks like fallocate and hugepages that Mold uses for faster file creation.
## Recent Mold Improvements
Mold gained significant speed improvements in 2.42.0 and 2.42.1 releases, which Wild's August benchmarks missed.
## Thread Count Differences
Wild runs faster with 32 threads on a 16-core machine but slower on 64-core Threadrippers with more RAM.
## Key takeaway

Wild linker performs slower than Mold in new benchmarks due to filesystem and threading differences