Profiling DLL/LIB Bloat

Question

I\'ve inherited a fairly large C++ project in VS2005 which compiles to a DLL of about 5MB. I\'d like to cut down the size of the library so it loads faster over the network

Answer 1

If your DLL is this big because it's exporting C++ function with exceptionally long mangled names, an alternative is to use a .DEF file to export the functions by ordinal, without name (using NONAME in the .DEF file). Somewhat brittle, but it reduces the DLL size, EXE size and load times.

See e.g. http://home.hiwaay.net/~georgech/WhitePapers/Exporting/Exp.htm