Linking with 3rd party CUDA libraries slows down cudaMalloc

It is not a secret that on CUDA 4.x the first call to cudaMalloc can be ridiculously slow (which was reported several times), seemingly a bug in CUDA drivers.

Recently, I noticed weird behaviour: the running time of cudaMalloc directly depends on how many 3rd-party CUDA libraries I linked to my program (note that I do NOT use these libraries, just link my program with them)

I ran some tests using the following program:

int main() {
  cudaSetDevice(0);
  unsigned int *ptr = 0;
  cudaMalloc((void **)&ptr, 2000000 * sizeof(unsigned int));   
  cudaFree(ptr);
return 1;
}

the results are as follows:

• Linked with: -lcudart -lnpp -lcufft -lcublas -lcusparse -lcurand running time: 5.852449

• Linked with: -lcudart -lnpp -lcufft -lcublas running time: 1.425120

• Linked with: -lcudart -lnpp -lcufft running time: 0.905424

• Linked with: -lcudart running time: 0.394558

According to 'gdb', the time indeed goes into my cudaMalloc, so it's not caused by some library initialization routine..

I wonder if somebody has plausible explanation for this ?