This one has been bugging me for a while.

I compile my app and it comes out at around 6.8Mb when I zip it to email that drops to c2.9Mb. I know there are string constants in there but.

Can anyone explain how and why a .exe can compress that much.

Roy Lambert

Roy,

> Can anyone explain how and why a .exe can compress that much.

Sure - lots of repeated byte sequences that can be huffman encoded
(relatively) efficiently - embedded DFMs in particular. The only type of
file that won't compress is 'random junk' and the contents of EXE files
are far from random.

Eryk

Eryk


I did what I should have done before posting and opened one up in Notepad - isn't there a lot of plain text.

Roy Lambert

Pack your exe before you ship it use a free packer suxh as
UPX from  http://upx.sourceforge.net
It also stops them guys with long hair and big bushy beards
messing about with the text in your file and reverse engineering
your code, well to some degree it does

Rita



"Roy Lambert" <roy.lambert@skynet.co.uk> wrote in message
news:D85710CA-7EBA-4280-8091-06112128154C@news.elevatesoft.com...
>
> This one has been bugging me for a while.
>
> I compile my app and it comes out at around 6.8Mb when I zip it to email
> that drops to c2.9Mb. I know there are string constants in there but.
>
> Can anyone explain how and why a .exe can compress that much.
>
> Roy Lambert
>

Roy,

I agree with Rita there.

I've used UPX a lot to tighten up things.  They released 3.0 a few months
ago and it works well.

Installshield actually uses UPX if you say to compress your install.   Where
as InstallAware uses 7Zip.

Using with Finalbuilder (love it), the action for UPX'ing during a build is
slick.

Lance

"Rita" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:6E62AA0A-9DD1-4360-B261-92FFE95F1C00@news.elevatesoft.com...
> Pack your exe before you ship it use a free packer suxh as
> UPX from  http://upx.sourceforge.net
> It also stops them guys with long hair and big bushy beards
> messing about with the text in your file and reverse engineering
> your code, well to some degree it does
>
> Rita
>
>
>
> "Roy Lambert" <roy.lambert@skynet.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:D85710CA-7EBA-4280-8091-06112128154C@news.elevatesoft.com...
>>
>> This one has been bugging me for a while.
>>
>> I compile my app and it comes out at around 6.8Mb when I zip it to email
>> that drops to c2.9Mb. I know there are string constants in there but.
>>
>> Can anyone explain how and why a .exe can compress that much.
>>
>> Roy Lambert
>>
>
>

PECompact at http://www.bitsum.com/index.asp is another good tool.

Fons