Re: Coreutils binary sizes over time

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* Alfred M. Szmidt (address@hidden) wrote:
> 
> Would be interesting to see how normal hard drive sizes have grown in
> that time as well.

Of course hard drive growth is fast; but not everything is as fast;
e.g. seek time and memory latency.

> But these graphs, while quite fun to watch, do not really provide much
> information, gcc's output has changed alot over the years, and the
> goal isn't to compile small binaries, but semi-fast ones, and that
> will always lead to bloat (what functions get inlined, how gcc
> compiles the same functions across versions, ...)

Indeed; still it seems wise to keep an eye on sizes just to make
sure things aren't getting silly.

> Even things how the binary format has changed is something that one
> has to take into account, 10 years ago is a.out times, which had much
> smaller binaries than ELF.

Nod; these are all ELF.

> What is the drop at 900000000 epoch?  That one looks fun; I am
> guessing it is the move to glibc 2.x?

Yes, it appears to be - the first one is linked against libc.so.5
and an earlier dynamic linker I don't have.

Going back to /bin/ls for a minute; using /usr/bin/time -a
on
/bin/ls /etc
the number of minor page faults isn't actually as simple a story
as the sizes:

fu 3.16-5.3 253
fu 4.0    258
fu 4.1-10 289
cu 5.2.1-2 370
cu 5.97-5  400
cu 6.10-2  313
cu 6.10-2007 315

(Those correspond to the points on the graph, except the first one
is missing since it is the libc 1.x version I can't easily run).

Dave
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