Re: Small executables

From: Bruce Roberts (ber_at_bounceitattcanada.xnet)
Date: 06/16/04 

Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 10:14:44 -0400

"Dr John Stockton" <spam@merlyn.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:a$qKzUAPv2zAFwj7@merlyn.demon.co.uk...

> That's a typical wasteful North American attitude.

Its only a wasteful attitude in a very narrow perspective - that of
pesistent disk utilization alone. From a system perspective it conserves
more, and more precious, resources. A UPX program, as another poster pointed
out, has to have its executable pages written to the swap file - meaning
less available virtual memory for the system and additional disk write
overhead which means more disk activity which means poorer system
performance and additional wear on the most mechanical device in the box. In
situations where multiple instances of the program are running, the
executable pages cannot be shared which means even more swap file usage. (I
don't know if Windows does it, but other o/s can even share in-memory
executable pages.)

> Those who can buy a new machine can (AIUI) reasonably get a 120 GB
> drive; though they may not want to. Those with older machines may not
> want to upsize merely to store bloat - I have an 8 GB disc on this
> machine, and it has remained about half full since I installed Delphi.

Even on an 8GB drive the potential savings is still sub 1% of space.

> And on my Web server, I have a 20 MB allocation, over half full. A
> saving of 20% of free space is not negligible.

True. But this is why I continue to suggest that executables be compressed
for transport (only). If you are executing programs on the server I'd
suggest a bigger allocation. You might consider a bigger allocation anyways.
There are numerous hosting services available that offer 100+MB for even
their most basic plan. And from what I've been reading both Google and Yahoo
are offering large amounts of storage to their email users.

> AIUI, discs have been getting not only bigger but faster; but CPUs have
> been getting faster faster. ISTM that compression at EXE generate time
> might save time then; and loading would probably always be faster
> (assuming an algorithm chosen for moderate compression and speedy
> decompression).

But the run-time overhead is not only in decompression, as I pointed out
above. And, while cpu have been getting faster, the disk to cpu differential
has not changed. Further, AFAIK, Windows doesn't load an entire executable
before it executes but a UPX executable has to be entirely loaded and
decompressed before it can execute.

Relevant Pages

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