memory footprint issue

Question

I was just curious I have a binary executable file in unix around 9MB. is that considered a large memory footprint? the client will be calling this to generate some values and subsequently queue messages elsewhere. I am just curious who is one suppose to know how when is it too big a memory footprint for a program and then having to provide like a static library instead of an executable?

Answer 1

Everything is relative. It's large footprint if the app is running on a machine with 8MB of RAM. It's not large if the app is running on a machine with 64GB RAM. Then again, it might be large even on a 64GB RAM machine if most of the RAM has been gobbled up by some huge Oracle instance (for example).

You should also take into account that only a part of those 9MB is actually loaded into RAM -- readelf or objdump utilities can show you how much exactly.