When does code bloat start having a noticeable effect on performance?

Posted by Kyle on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Kyle
Published on 2010-05-15T00:00:10Z Indexed on 2010/05/15 0:04 UTC
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c++

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bloat

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Performance

I am looking to make a hefty shift towards templates in one of my OpenGL projects, mainly for fun and the learning experience. I plan on watching the size of the executable carefully as I do this, to see just how much of the notorious bloat happens. Currently, the size of my Release build is around 580 KB when I favor speed and 440 KB when I favor size.

Yes, it's a tiny project, and in fact even if my executable bloats 10 x its size, it's still going to be 5 MB or so, which hardly seems large by today's standards... or is it? This brings me to my question. Is speed proportional to size, or are there leaps and plateaus at certain thresholds, thresholds which I should be aiming to stay below? (And if so, what are the thresholds specifically?)

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