Hi, On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 4:15 PM Jim Hall via Freedos-devel <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've always wondered about the performance impact of UPX, but haven't > really explored it. Maybe someone else has. I get that a UPX'd EXE > will be smaller -- but don't you also get a performance hit every time > you run the program, because the EXE needs to be decompressed before > it can run? > > Maybe that's not a big deal for a larger "desktop" app like a > spreadsheet or editor or word processor, but is UPX "worth it" for > common tools that you run all the time?
The NRV (or UCL) methods are plenty fast. It's only the (optional, not default) LZMA that can negatively affect apps' startup speed, especially for pre-586 machines (or slow emulation like DOSBox, a "fast 486"). Also, UPX'd DJGPP apps run slower under Windows (NTVDM) than if uncompressed. But "--best --8086" should not show a huge slowdown, no. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
