Hello language_fan,
You have probably already noticed that there is always a tradeoff to be made. Either you get smaller binaries and faster compilation times or larger binaries and (perhaps) more efficient runtime performance. Note that if the data structures are small, generating them takes very little time on modern 32/64-bit hardware. OTOH if you have tens of megabytes of binary data in your .exe, hard drives are a serious bottleneck.
If the data is setup correctly (e.i. not mixed in with other stuff) then the only the data that is called for will be paged in. I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation where this would be less than ideal.
The only case I can think of is where the data can be compressed a lot and you page in compressed structures and then expand as needed into memory. Most simple systems would read in the same data in a (probably bulkier format) but do it all before the first access.
