On Mon, Dec 06, 1999 at 12:32:22PM +0530, Sharad Joshi wrote:
> + It's a constant overhead due to ELF headers. If you increase the size of
> + the text/data sections (as is typical for a Linux executable), the overhead
> + becomes negligible.
>
> I guessed that. But did not know that the "overhead" was so large. In some
> cases (even in the case of "big" .o's in the range of 20k) this "overhead"
> is almost 30-35%. Interesting stats. 'Think i'll have to dig into d-tails
> of binary formats for more info.
Oh, I take it back. There is a symbol table that is a part of the large
executables. The size of the symbol table increases with the number of
symbols.
A while ago, this was a major concern on
news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.unix
Linux binaries were bloated compared to Windows ones - especially so
in the presence of a large number of shared libs. Someone wrote a
compiler patch to reduce it to some extent. But you need a patched
compiler for that.
One common tip is to make all your global variables/funcs static, if they're
not used outside the file.
-Arun
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