UPX-Packer ja oder nein?

[Uwe Raabe]

Jordan Russel (InnoSetup) hat da mal was zu geschrieben: Why not use an EXE compressor?

Zitat:

Why not use an EXE compressor?

Some have asked why I made StripReloc when there are EXE compression programs such as ASPack and UPX that will trim more bytes off of executables than StripReloc ever could.

The reason is there are downsides to using EXE compressors. Most notably:

• Upon startup of a compressed EXE/DLL, all of the code is decompressed from the disk image into memory in one pass, which can cause disk thrashing if the system is low on memory and is forced to access the swap file. In contrast, with uncompressed EXE/DLLs, the OS allocates memory for code pages on demand (i.e. when they are executed).
• Multiple instances of a compressed EXE/DLL create multiple instances of the code in memory. If you have a compressed EXE that contains 1 MB of code (before compression) and the user starts 5 instances of it, approximately 4 MB of memory is wasted. Likewise, if you have a DLL that is 1 MB and it is used by 5 running applications, approximately 4 MB of memory is wasted. With uncompressed EXE/DLLs, code is only stored in memory once and is shared between instances.
• Some older virus scanners flag compressed EXE/DLLs as being virus-infected. (This is this reason I stopped compressing Inno Setup's EXEs.)
  Update: In fairness, this was written several years ago. This very well may no longer be an issue today.