Profiling DLL/LIB Bloat

Question

I\'ve inherited a fairly large C++ project in VS2005 which compiles to a DLL of about 5MB. I\'d like to cut down the size of the library so it loads faster over the network

Answer 1

i would recommend one of the following:

coverage - you can run a coverage tool in the hope of detecting some dead code

caching - cache the dll on the client side on the initial activatio

splitting - split the dll into several smaller dlls, start the application with the bootstrap dll and download the other dlls after the application starts

compilation and linking - use smaller run time library, compile with size optimization, etc. see this link for more suggestions.

compression - if you have data or large resources within the dll, you can compress them and decompress only after the download or at runtime.