Yes, but if there are almost no syscalls, then strace is doing a lot less. Profiling my trivial program with callgrind shows (unsurprisingly) that the majority

Yes, but if there are almost no syscalls, then strace is doing a lot less. Profiling my trivial program with callgrind shows (unsurprisingly) that the majority of the time is in dynamic library relocation and whatever __GI__tunables_init does: https://i.imgur.com/Yligh7S.png https://i.imgur.com/Yligh7S.png