optimize for size -- disk io & mem
 

I read a post on this site about the idea of optimizing the kernel and other large binaries for size (-Os) to reduce disk i/o. Has anyone had any success with this idea? I can see it maybe having performance improvements for huge apps like KDE.

My question is, would there be any reasonable memory improvement for this approach as well? I have a machine with limited memory at home (32-64MB) and I was considering compiling the kernel with -Os to reduce the size of the kernel image in memory (rather than -O3).

Is that a reasonable approach? Anyone every consider/try this?

while it can reduce the size of the system, it will also make it run slower ..... its just one of those things, but if your system has that little ram, why bother using KDE? .. you should invest in looking at minimal desktop, that will take up far less RAM

also, the kernel isent that big to begin with, so using -Os on it can only make it slower, and probably only save enough space to add a picture to RAM

so i wouldent recomend using -Os for small programs like the kernel, you should optimise for speed here, and if size is important, then go for size on programs that it can make a difrence

im not sure, but uclibc can make programs very smaller, but i dont remember if it has effect on RAM.. it would make them smaller tho, but slower

anyways, i used a system with only 64MB of ram before, took long to compile everything, but there wasent really any need to make things smaller, its not like the system was fast enough to run to many programs off of anyways

Good point. I guess it's kind of a problem specific issue anyway. Compiling the 2.6 and 2.4 series kernels for O3 vs Os yields about 300k size reduction. I guess it would only be useful to use the smaller kernel if swap space usage is around 300k.

Heh, and I didn't mean to imply I used KDE on 64MB RAM. I can only imagine the results. I just used that as an example where -Os may improve size considerably, maybe reducing i/o. That's an interesting tradeoff to consider.