Is OS Wasting Memory? Quick Experiment Results

  • Thread starter Thread starter waht
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Memory Os
Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
Sign up Log in
1 reply · 2K views
waht
Messages
1,502
Reaction score
4
I did a quick experiment. First I compiled a simple hello world program in C++ , using a gcc compiler. The source code is 100 bytes, but the executable file it 9.6 kb.

Then I dumbed the executable into hex using xxd, to check up on the 0s and 1s. It turns out there is a huge gap, almost a kilobyte long of zeros.

I'm wondering if this is some sort of delay, or just unused bits?
 

Discussion

Physics news on Phys.org
I'm guessing that the section with 0s is the data segment of your program, and that unless you specify otherwise, it will allocate a 1K block for it. I don't have any experience with gcc, so don't know if you can configure it to use less memory. Check the docs for gcc.