I discovered something interesting. The most recent Prime95 executable is
very large, 1212928 bytes long. However, if I use UPX (Ultimate Packer for
eXecutables, upx.tsx.org) with the --best option, I can compress Prime95
down to 238542 bytes! That's about 20% of its original size. The
compression process, happily, is invisible to the end user, and incurs no
time or memory cost; the compressed Prime95 behaves just as the original
did. Saving space is always a good idea. This compression is actually
better than ZIP compression, so when the distribution zipfile includes the
smaller executable, it too becomes smaller: from 405953 bytes to 299756
bytes. This makes the download go quicker for everyone, which especially
matters to modem users, but is nice even for people with fast connections.
Awesome.
Stephan T. Lavavej
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