Shrinking Using UPX

I have been shrinking MANY programs and dll's lately using UPX compression, so that I can put a few more things on my USB Pen Drives. I have discovered that the LUA dll can be shrunk quite a bit, actually for LUA50.dll (Version 3.74 of MUSHclient) the compression ratio was slightly over 50%. This is not VERY much, but might even shrink the installer by 75k, that is not much at all, but for those on dialup connections, that can be considered bloat of up to a minute or more depending on ISP.

Just something I stumbled upon, and I noticed that the MUSHclient.exe itself was fully UPX compressed, which was nice to know, and if you are using an older version of the program, like myself, the spell checker dll can be packed by about 43%. This is not an issue with newer versions as I believe that is no longer included, due to licensing.

Even the installers can be UPX packed by a little bit (Version 4.06 was packed by 0.015MB). Again it is not much, but adds up to something on bandwidth for something being downloaded several hundred times a month.

Just my 2 Cents :)

Laterzzz,
Onoitsu2

Not to knock it, but isn't UPX just LZO compression? Does it have a self-extractor? Most people probably wouldn't recognize the extension even though it's been out for over a decade, but if it self-extracts, that's a non-issue.

Not to be overly obsessive about this but it is Lua, not LUA. It's not an acronym. :)

I used to UPX compress MUSHclient, but stopped doing it when I moved the resources to the resources DLL file. After all, the installer download is compressed anyway, and compressing a compressed file doesn't generally do much. If I was worried about that last 1% for the installer size, I can always crank up the compression ratio for the installer.

Anyone who downloads MUSHclient, and wants to put it somewhere small (like a memory stick) can always use UPX themselves, after installing. However I think these problems go away a bit - we used to have small floppy disks (around 1.4 Mb) but nowadays you have 2 Gb memory sticks, so I think the need to save tiny amounts of disk are gone, a bit.