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copied!<p>The recommendation is that you not:</p> <ul> <li>EXE compressors can make your application seem like a virus (self-modifying)</li> <li>gzip/zip are just as effective at compressing and don't tinker with your app</li> <li>EXE compressors make the load times of your app increase (unless you're just talking about the setup program which is a different matter</li> </ul> <p>This crazy looking site brings up an argument I had heard in the distant past (whether it's true or not still today, I'm not sure, modern packers probably have a different strategy today) <em>This article references Win32!</em> :)</p> <p><a href="http://topic.csdn.net/t/20000408/08/6785.html" rel="noreferrer">http://topic.csdn.net/t/20000408/08/6785.html</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Modern multitasking OSes such as Windows 95/98 and NT use what is called a "virtual memory" system. When programs start, all of their code is not loaded into memory immediately upon startup, as was the case with DOS programs. Instead, only portions of the code being actively executed are stored into memory. For example, say your program has a Print option on its menu, and code behind it that handles the printing. This code will only be loaded into memory once the Print feature is first selected by the user. And if after the code is loaded into memory the Print feature is not used for a while the system will "discard" the code, freeing the memory it occupied, if another application desperately needs memory. This is part of a process called "paging" and is completely transparent to the program.</p> <p>Another way paging under Win32 conserves memory is it causes multiple instances of a program (or DLL) to share the same memory for code. In other words, under normal circumstances there is no real difference in the amount of physical memory allocated for code between starting 100 instances of a program and starting one instance.</p> <p>If all Win32 programs behaved like DOS programs, loading everything into memory and keeping it there until the program terminated and also not sharing any memory between multiple instances, you can probably imagine how quickly physical memory could run out on systems with a limited amount, causing disk swapping to start. </p> <p>Yet this is precisely what current Win32 EXE compressors do to your EXE's/DLL's! They completely go against the OS's paging system by decompressing all code into memory and keeping it there until termination. And because code isn't stored in a "raw" format in the EXE file (i.e. the same way it is stored in memory), the OS is unable to share code between multiple instances.</p> </blockquote>

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