does this apply to android too? please verify

I did some measurements for linking chrome in a Chromium OS chroot.
All numbers are for linking amd64 chrome (for --board=panther).
Used three link modes:
1) Using ninja ("rm chrome; time ninja chrome" to measure the time taken for linking).
2) Directly invoking the linker (use "ninja -v -n chrome >link" to get the linker command line, then time with "time ./link").
3) Invoking the linker after overriding LC_ALL ("time LC_ALL=C ./link").

I did several runs for each of these link modes. In all the runs, the linking step took approx. 2m25s on my workstation. No variation was found to suspect any one mode of linking was faster than the others.

Also verified that the default locale setting in my chroot has all LC_* variables set to "en_US.UTF-8", and "export LC_ALL=C" sets them all to "C".

Regarding Android, I don't know if this applies. Is there a single binary on the order of chromium in the android build?

I did a build for aosp_bullhead-userdebug and looked in the out directory. Didn't see anything obvious bigger than ~30MB. Any linker slowdown due to locale settings may not be apparent in small links like these.

In any case, I have verified that the locale settings in android build environment also seem to default to "en_US.UTF-8", just like in the chromiumos chroot.

did you ask about the linker version where this problem happens? maybe they were not using the same linker?

ah, and the original bug mentions libchrome. We could build that.

what was the original submitter starting with for locale settings? en_US.UTF-8

Yes, the original locale setting seems to be "en_US.UTF-8" (from the bug report on gold: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=20447).