Reducing the size of 4D executables
David M. Laur
DMLAUR at pucc.Princeton.EDU
Sat Mar 4 02:08:11 AEST 1989
As part of our graphics research activity, the Princeton Interactive
Computer Graphics Lab (ICGL) maintains a cluster of 16 Personal IRIS
workstations which is available to students and faculty 24 hours a
day. There are currently 675 users registered in our password file,
although not all of these are continuously active users.
One of the biggest system administration headaches we face is keeping
a useful amount of disk space available to the users (and ourselves).
This problem is exacerbated by the relatively larger size of programs
compiled for the 4D's RISC processor, compared to a typical CISC
executable.
In desparation, we read the documentation.
It turns out that there are some pretty painless mechanisms for
reducing the size of a typical 4D executable. Kevin Perry (our systems
programmer), recently compiled a moderate-size GL program with a
variety of different cc command-line options, and noted the sizes of
the resulting executables. Here are the results of this test:
Compilation Cmd Executable Size
cc -g test.c -lgl: 330 Kb (with symbol table, debugging)
cc test.c -lgl: 330 Kb (with symbol table)
cc -s test.c -lgl: 196 Kb (strip symbol table)
cc -s test.c -lgl_s: 53 Kb (use shared GL library)
cc -s test.c -lgl_s -lc_s: 33 Kb (use shared GL and C libraries)
cc -s -O test.c -lgl_s -lc_s: 29 Kb (use optimizer)
Note: The -g option is meaningless if combined with the -s option.
So: we have found it useful to advertise the use of some of these
options, and have changed our existing makefiles to take advantage of
them.
+---------------+ David Laur
| "a bizarre | Princeton University
| underwater | Interactive Computer Graphics Lab
| scenerio..." | Internet: dmlaur at magritte.princeton.edu
+---------------+ Bitnet: dmlaur at pucc
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