Configuration options [was: Policy question - to PM3D or not to PM3D?]

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

Here is an updated analysis of the affect of various configuration
options on the size of the gnuplot executable. All trials were
compiled using gcc 3.3.2 with CFLAGS "-g -O2" on a 32-bit Athlon.

  "text" contains the code section itself
  "data" contains initialized constants (e.g. string constants)
  "bss"  contains static declared storage (e.g. int foo[BIG])
  "dec"  is the total text+data+bss

# 11 Jul 2005
#----------------------------------------------------------------
    text     data      bss      dec  filename
#----------------------------------------------------------------
  912159    83428    34144  1029731  gnuplot_default
  904447    83428    34048  1021923  gnuplot_nostrings      -0.8%
  893205    83188    34144  1010537  gnuplot_noimage        -2%
  817009    78380    30912   926301  gnuplot_nopm3d        -10% 
  681291    60492    17920   759703  gnuplot_shortterm+gd  -26%
  666013    59620    14304   739937  gnuplot_shorttermlist -28%
  605467    55304    17664   678435  gnuplot_dumb+gd+x11   -34%

The first 4 were all built with the default set of terminal drivers
(including pdf and gd). The last three were built with default 
configuration options, but a reduced set of terminal drivers
  "shortterm+gd" = dumb post estimate x11 gd
  "shortterm"    = dumb post estimate x11
  "dumb+gd+x11"  = dumb x11 gd


Bottom line conclusion:

  If you want to reduce the size of the gnuplot executable, there is
  very little to be gained by disabling configuration options. Disabling
  pm3d (which automatically disables with-image and binary-polygon also)
  reduces the size by only 10%.

  On the other hand, the driver set is huge. In a default build, 40% of
  the total size of the gnuplot executable is in term.o (not shown).

  For fun, I re-compiled term.o many times with only a single driver
  enabled each time.  The resulting sizes (minus the base size of the
  core code in term.c itself) are shown in the attached plots.


Notes:

  This analysis reveals that omitting a small set of drivers, for
  example (corel tgif tkcanvas tpic), has more effect on size than
  configuring with  --disable-pm3d --disable-with-image

  The recent changes to pslatex.trm have made it impossible to omit
  the pslatex driver from a gnuplot build without hacking the code
  in several places.  I'll rant on this in a separate Email.

  This analysis does not show the effect of compilation options on
  dynamically allocated storage, but this should be a very small
  effect. 

-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195