Let's build small Qt libraries! (Step 2: Optimize build-settings)

Peppy

Use UPX for binaries "UPX":http://upx.sourceforge.net/
It means probably a library -lmath, -luser32, -lkernel32 etc...

Hedge

I will use UPX -9, but that's the last step. For now it is building qconfig.

Peppy

I've never used UPX for Qt Framework because I didn't have to...there are just big libraries for debugging (I think QtGuid.dll has around 140MB), for release, they don't have things for debugging so it spends much less space on your harddisk...

How much it spends in your computer?

Hedge

With UPX -9 packed my tool (including all libraries) is around 9 MB in size (with the release-libraries)

I know we can smash it down further!

deni-herdiman

hi,
i noticed upx not support PE+ or win64, might use mpress http://www.matcode.com/mpress.htm
it work like a charm.. :)

Hedge

I will try mpress as well.

To get qconfig compiled I will build the whole Qt Suite again with some exceptions (-nomake examples -nomake demos).

Peppy

9MB is too much?

I suppose you do it for school. In that way, I think you should use "static" release, it adds Qt Framework Libraries into your project libraries, so you won't have to carry Qt DLLs with project, but it will have to effect on size of your binaries, after that you should use UPX....

Hedge

I've already programmed this tool twice (in Object Pascal and C#). The tool was always around 2-3 MB in size.

I don't want to scare my users off and am generally interested in this whole build-improvement thing.

Binding it statically won't reduce the size much (and isn't allowed in that context either if I go LGPGL).

@Peppy: I will try the MSVC-compiler as well.

goetz

As you're on Windows using MinGW (I know your project quite good now :-) ) you must add the respective mkspec:

@
./configure -platform win32-gcc ... your additional args go here ....
@

The rest of your no-xxx switches does not influence the size very significantly. It just leaves out the build of some submodules and the like, which you would not put into your final applications directory anyways.

Be sure to create release libs (without debugging symbols), this decreases the size of the libs significantly!

And finally you can try to run MinGW/bin/strip.exe on every executable and library (DLL) you have in your directory. I did not try this yet, but at least on Unix this reduces the size even more.

For distribution, put it all in a ZIP. UPX and the like is not really useful IMHO. The exe and the libs must be decompressed eventually to run the program, thus slowing down the start up time of your application.

Remember: Disk space is cheap :-)

Peppy

@Volker: I thought so. But I am very surpised that somebody wants to compress binaries on the maximum in time when we have 2-3 TBytes harddisks (no everybody has terabytes harddrives, but 16MB is not so much...)...

I am compiling under MSVC 2008 compiler and it's quite better than MinGW (IMHO)...

BTW. What is the name of your project? :-)

Hedge

bq. As you’re on Windows using MinGW (I know your project quite good now :-) ) you must add the respective mkspec:
./configure -platform win32-gcc ... your additional args go here ....

Just making sure. So I need to attach the compiler-switches like -fmerge-all-constants already in the configure-step?

These are the Qt-dll's and their sizes my program currently needs:

@Uncompressed size | UPX -9 size | Name

  2,43MB          |    0,91MB    | QTCore4.dll
  2,92MB          |    0,86MB    | QTDeclarative4.dll
  9,39MB          |    3,69MB    | QtGui4.dll
  1,15MB          |    0,40MB    | QTNetwork4.dll
  2,07MB          |    0,65MB    | QTScript4.dll
  0,20MB          |    0,10MB    | QTSql4.dll
  3,82MB          |    0,94MB    | QTXmlPatterns4.dll

 21,98MB              7,55MB@

Especially QtGui4.dll should be reducable much further since I'm using exclusively QML (with Jens desktop-components) for the GUI.

Peppy

Quite big difference...but there is a good question: Do you need it? Will it help you as you are waiting? Has the binary compression any result on booting (I mean loading) time?

goetz

The DLLs cannot be shrunk, unfortunately. They contain all the symbols of the module, even if you only need one of them. And QML of course depends heavily on the widgets in QtGui :-)

Peppy

DLLs should get redesigned, this system is too old (from Windows 95, I think), but that's the work of Microsoft...

Hedge

So even qconfig won't help?
I could exclude some widgets in the sourcecode but that is a bit too much (imagine I need to do this for every new qt-version).

strip <file> -s didn't really do much. Any other useful parameters?

What I am aiming for is a small download-size for users.

Peppy

-o1, ..., -o5 for MinGW

Hedge

Where do I use these flags?

I initially asked where I can apply the compiler-flags:

bq. -Os
-fmerge-all-constants
-fno-default-inline
-fno-inline

Neither configure nor mingw32-make accept them.

goetz

[quote author="Peppy" date="1305654867"]DLLs should get redesigned, this system is too old (from Windows 95, I think), but that's the work of Microsoft...[/quote]

Shared libraries (.so on unix/linux, .dylib on Macs) behave just the same way! They were intended to reduce the memory footprint (a shared library is loaded into memory only once and used by multiple programs), as well as disk space. Both are not so an issue anymore these days.

So, a Mac application bundle is "bloated" too, as would be a linux archive containing all necessary non-system libraries.

goetz

[quote author="Hedge" date="1305654933"]So even qconfig won't help?
I could exclude some widgets in the sourcecode but that is a bit too much (imagine I need to do this for every new qt-version).

strip <file> -s didn't really do much. Any other useful parameters?

What I am aiming for is a small download-size for users.[/quote]

No, qconfig does not help. The DLLs will always contain all widgets.

strip regularly does not save very much space on binaries compiled in release mode already.

If you're only after a small download size, use a decent archiver and set it's mode to maximum compression.

[quote author="Hedge" date="1305655290"]Where do I use these flags?

I initially asked where I can apply the compiler-flags:

bq. -Os
-fmerge-all-constants
-fno-default-inline
-fno-inline

Neither configure nor mingw32-make accept them.[/quote]

These are compiler/linker flags, you can try to set them for configure this way:

@
CFLAGS="-Os -fmerge-all-constants -fno-default-inline -fno-inline"
./configure -platform win32-g++
your additional flags go here
@

But be aware that fiddling with optimization settings (-Os) may make things worse or add a runtime slowdown penalty.

Peppy

But they were designed about 20 years before, and probably they will change...

But back to the topic, I don't remember what it was...

I think: http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Reducing_Executable_Size (--strip-all)