[erebe__]

Normal build

  cargo build --bin engine-gateway --release
      Finished `release` profile [optimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1m 00s

  ls -lh target/release/engine-gateway 
  .rwxr-xr-x erebe erebe 198 MB Sun Jan 19 12:37:35 2025    target/release/engine-gateway

what we ship

  export RUSTFLAGS="-C link-arg=-Wl,--compress-debug-sections=zlib -C force-frame-pointers=yes" 
  cargo build --bin engine-gateway --release
      Finished `release` profile [optimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1m 04s

  ls -lh target/release/engine-gateway
  .rwxr-xr-x erebe erebe 61 MB Sun Jan 19 12:39:13 2025  target/release/engine-gateway

The diff is more impressive on some bigger projects

[adastra22]

The compressed symbols sounds like the likely culprit. Do you really need a small executable? The uncompressed symbols need to be loaded into RAM anyway, and if it is delayed until it is needed then you will have to allocate memory to uncompress them.

[erebe__]

I will give it a shot next week to try out ;P

For this particular service, the size does not matter really. For others, it makes more diff (several hundred of Mb) and as we deploy on customers infra, we want images' size to stay reasonable. For now, we apply the same build rules for all our services to stay consistent.