Our binaries are not stripped

[Metallion]

Problem

Our binaries aren't stripped. This means unnecessary symbols and debug information is still in there. We should strip them to save space.

[kemumaki@executor bin]$ file openvdc
openvdc: ELF 64-bit LSB executable .... not stripped
[kemumaki@executor bin]$ file openvdc-executor
openvdc-executor: ELF 64-bit LSB executable .... not stripped

Solution

Run the strip command on them before packaging. It's just a small difference but we should still do it.

Read the blog @unakatsuo posted below. :)

[unakatsuo]

https://blog.filippo.io/shrink-your-go-binaries-with-this-one-weird-trick/

Go binaries are their own thing and they don't play well with the standard strip utility, so don't use that.

[Metallion]

Interesting.

Instead, we can use the -s and -w linker flags like this:

$ GOOS=linux go build cmd/go
$ ls -l go
-rwxr-xr-x  1 filippo  staff  12493536 Apr 16 16:58 go
$ GOOS=linux go build -ldflags="-s -w" cmd/go
$ ls -l go
-rwxr-xr-x  1 filippo  staff  8941952 Apr 16 17:08 go

[unakatsuo]

https://blog.golang.org/go1.7-binary-size

Typical programs, ranging from tiny toys to large production programs, are about 30% smaller when built with Go 1.7.

The canonical hello world program goes from 2.3MB to 1.6MB: