What should developers know about Windows executable binary file compression?
- by Peter Turner
I'd never heard of this before, so shame on me, but programs like UPX can compress my files by 80% which is totally sweet, but I have no idea what the the disadvantages are in doing this. Or even what the compressor does.
Website linked above doesn't say anything about dynamically linking DLLs but it mentions about compressing DESCENT 2 and about compressing Netscape 4.06. Also, it doesn't say what the tradeoffs are, only the benefits. If there weren't tradeoffs why wouldn't my linker compress the file?
If I have an environment where I have one executable and 20-30 DLL's, some of which are dynamically loaded an unloaded fairly arbitrarily, but not in loops (hopefully), do I take a big hit in processing time decompressing these DLL's when they're used?