Delphi EXE compressor? [closed]

Question

At one point I had a nice little compression utility that smashed my Delphi compiled EXE's to a smaller download size, but now I can't find it. Any recommendations?

Also, are there any downsides to using these kinds of utilities? (I mainly use them to shorten download times for rural / dial-up users).

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Related question: Are there any downsides to using UPX to compress a Windows executable?

Answer 1

I believe Terminal servers (Like Citrix) will use the same memory for you're application binary if it is uncompressed. Meaning a compressed exe could smell a small disaster in a Citrix environment.

Answer 2

I don't know of any that are specifically for Delphi, but UPX is very popular for this sort of thing. The only downside is that the executable has to be decompressed when it's launched, and that can eat some time. It seems to be very fast for sanely sized executables, though.

Answer 3

I asked a question about the con's of using UPX on Delphi executables here on SO a while back, and I got some great responses.

Are there any downsides to using UPX to compress a Windows executable?

Answer 4

You can use PECompact since people can't decrypt it easily, and as test showed (showed on main page, just scroll down a bit) it's better than ASPack or UPX, i've using it on my previous Delphi projects

Answer 5

Use UPX with lzma option for max compression.

upx --lzma yourfile.exe

Answer 6

I would also vote for upx. Beside the downsides which were mentioned it also protects from basic reverse engineering and those lame "resource hacker" tools. Which by the way are plenty, and most of them fail to open a compressed executable.