Re: LYNX-DEV 2-8 size

[David Woolley]

> dramatically!  If you get 55% like I do, you'll have a 0.847 M executable.
> Not too bad...

gzexe only helps on disk space.  It is neutral on memory if there is only
one instance of the program active at once and positively bad if there
is more than one, because there has to be a RAM copy of the read only
data and code for each instance, rather than one for the whole system
(as well as an expanded copy on disk for every instance).

A large memory image means that it may require a larger mimimum system;
the excuses for this tend to be the ones that excuse the bloatedness of
GUI browsers (i.e. but no one has less than 64M these days (written on a
6M machine)).

A large memory image also increases the time to pull it off disk for
the first use or when it has to be paged back in (it must take about
30 seconds to load MSIE or Word 97 (even though the latter seems to go
to sleep later as though it was loading functions incrementally) on a
100MHz Pentium, but Lynx can be up in a second or so on a 386 SX 25).
However paging in the over 1M is never going to be instantaneous.