Big increase in size of Phoenix.exe

[old Neil Parks]

Until now, in all the Phoenix releases for Windoze that I have tried, the size of the phoenix.exe file was always about 57000 bytes.

I have just installed 12/1 nightly using the Installer at
http://seb.delahaye.net/phoenix/
and was surprised to find that the EXE has grown to <B>6,381,568</B>.

Using UPX 1.24w (see http://upx.sourceforge.net/ ) with the "--best" parameter, it shrank to 2.619,392--but that's still pretty hefty compared to the way it was.

I have not looked at the official 12/1 nightly release. Is the EXE in that archive equally huge, or is it just the Installer version? And if the official version has grown so much, why?

[dean]

I noticed this too, but I also noticed that the size of the .zip is relatively the same. Looking a little further, there are now only 17 DLLs included in the archive. There are 72 DLLs in my old Phoenix directory. It looks like most of these DLLs are now compiled into Phoenix.exe, including the two big ones, gkcontent.dll and gklayout.dll, which were roughtly 2.5 MB combined.

Top five largest DLLs that are no longer present:
gkcontent.dll - 1420 KB
gklayout.dll - 1100KB
uconv.dll - 704 KB
necko.dll - 396 KB
appcomps.dll - 228 KB

[seb]

I have not looked at the official 12/1 nightly release. Is the EXE in that archive equally huge, or is it just the Installer version? And if the official version has grown so much, why?

From my FAQ:

• Do you make your own builds?
• No, I'm using the win32 zipped builds available almost every day. I think that for tracking bugs, it's better to use the same builds.

So, it's the same in the builds from mozilla.org.

[tve]

theres no increase in the build size, so I dont care/mind

[alanjstr]

Until now, in all the Phoenix releases for Windoze that I have tried, the size of the phoenix.exe file was always about 57000 bytes.

I have just installed 12/1 nightly using the Installer at
http://seb.delahaye.net/phoenix/
and was surprised to find that the EXE has grown to <B>6,381,568</B>.

Using UPX 1.24w (see http://upx.sourceforge.net/ ) with the "--best" parameter, it shrank to 2.619,392--but that's still pretty hefty compared to the way it was.

I have not looked at the official 12/1 nightly release. Is the EXE in that archive equally huge, or is it just the Installer version? And if the official version has grown so much, why?

There's already a thread or two about UPX. But let me sum up: Smaller download size does not mean smaller memory footprint necessarily. If you pack it with UPX, it still must be unpacked into memory.

Don't sweat the nightly build sizes. They'll go up and down as they add new stuff and fix things. For a real comparison, judge the 'stable' releases of 0.1 to 0.4.

Also, you're talking about an unofficial installer here. Have you looked at the actual nightly?

[seb]

Alan, read my post just above. The installer just packages the zipped builds. I don't modify *anything* in the nightly builds before packaging them.

[alanjstr]

Alan, read my post just above. The installer just packages the zipped builds. I don't modify *anything* in the nightly builds before packaging them.

I knew that. I guess I should also add that your site is unofficial and you have nothing to do with build size.

[seb]

Just for testing, I've compressed phoenix.exe and every Phoenix .dll from the latest nightly with UPX (with the --best option).

Uncompressed (normal) Phoenix:
Size on disk: 12.3 MB
Size on disk for the installer: 5.71 MB
Memory used: between 21 and 24 MB
VM size: between 14 and 18 MB

Phoenix compressed with UPX
Size on disk: 7.66 MB
Size on disk for the installer: 5.46 MB
Memory used: between 22 and 26 MB
VM size: between 19 and 27 MB


So: great (but useless) size reduction; little (~250KB) size reduction for the installer; Memory usage and VM size have both grown (with a significant growth for the VM size).
Is it worth it? I don't think so. A 250KB size reduction is nice to have, but the growth of the VM size is a major drawback for me.

ps: if you want to test this by yourselves, you can download it here: http://seb.delahaye.net/phoenix/Phoenix ... -setup.exe
I've made my very basic testing with the same tabs, opened in the same order.

[Jugalator]

Hm.. I recently read something about compressed EXE's aren't any good since not only do they use to need more RAM (which is far worse to me than a few extra Mb's on disk), but the OS also get problems detecting if any DLL's in use by the compressed app is already loaded into memory by another one. Or still in memory since an earlier loaded app. It can detect this with uncompressed exe's and thereby save memory by somehow sharing the same DLL. At least that's how I understood it. On a second thought, perhaps that's exactly why the VM size increase?