That super tiny app takes 500 MEGABYTES (>500,000 KB!) of RAM to open on Windows 7, 64 bit!!!

[OldFaithfull]

Make no mistake, I absolutely LOVE the concept... But I was getting slowdowns for what seemed like unknown reasons... Until I checked with Task Manager and saw, to my astonishment, that EACH INSTANCE uses up more than 500 MB of RAM on my Windows 7, 64 bit machine!!! 50 times more than Notepad++ uses, whose executable is 1000 times larger!

Any one else noticed this behaviour? And any ideas what could be causing that?

[adeii]

501 MB on Win 8.1 x64, too.
Original notepad.exe is 0,9 MB.

[ompadu]

501 MB on Win 10 x64 as well.

It's because of Crinkler. I have assembled it with the normal MSVC linker and the resulting binary is 11KB and it uses about 1.7MB of RAM.

To whom it might concern, here is the modified build script (adjust the paths accordingly and run it in the x86 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS):

@echo off
C:\masm32\bin\ml.exe /nologo /c /coff /Cp /IC:\masm32\include trpad.asm

link trpad.obj ^
  /NOLOGO ^
  /OUT:trpad.exe ^
  /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS ^
  /LIBPATH:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Lib\10.0.26100.0\um\x86" ^
  kernel32.lib user32.lib shell32.lib comdlg32.lib gdi32.lib

del trpad.obj

[hfiref0x]

Aside of dropping crinkler (which is cheating IMO) you can achieve same 11/14KB 32/64bit compiled versions of the same code written in plain C using MSVC 2026 with proper compiler/linker settings.

[OldFaithfull]

Thank you for the explanation. In any case I think the whole thing was basically an exercise in achieving the smallest executable possible, like with the demo scene. It's for the art of it!

For those of us who don't own a compiler nor have the expertise to use one, an 11K uncompresed version would be great, it would not even take 3 clusters on my hard drive. It would be nice, however, to fix the non functional find and replace feature before that.

ompadu, could you publish your uncompressed build?

[Meus-Artis]

501MB?
Using the exe in the repo itself, its always 515.55MB for me on W10 19045, wonder where that extra 14MB is coming from

[levicki]

@davepl

0x000000000041f000, Image: Commit, 500.01 MB, RWX, D:\Downloads\trpad.exe, 500.01 MB, 500.01 MB, , , 

As others have said, culprit is Crinkler and the fact that it leaves CODE section as RWX after decompressing is just horrible security-wise even if notepad isn't a high-value target.

[levicki]

@hfiref0x

you can achieve same 11/14KB 32/64bit compiled versions of the same code written in plain C using MSVC 2026 with proper compiler/linker settings.

You can probably do even better with older linker from VS 2003 or even VC6.

EDIT:

With MASM32 linker:

c:\masm32\bin\link trpad.obj /nologo /machine:x86 /out:trpad.exe /entry:MainEntry /subsystem:windows /LIBPATH:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Lib\10.0.26100.0\um\x86" kernel32.lib user32.lib shell32.lib comdlg32.lib gdi32.lib /OPT:ICF /OPT:REF /release /stub:C:\PROGRAMS\LEVICKI.NET\STUB\stub.exe /merge:.rdata=.text /align:16

Note that I have a custom stub here (64 bytes), and also that even MASM32 linker inserts Rich BS in header thus inflating the size.

Even with that I am getting:

07/03/2026  11:21 PM             8,736 trpad.exe

No need for Crinkler and it can actually run on older hardware which doesn't support SSE4.2 and has 512MB RAM.

[mandel99]

The RAM usage can be reduced with HASHSIZE parameter but the exe will be slightly bigger
#26

[levicki]

The RAM usage can be reduced with HASHSIZE parameter but the exe will be slightly bigger #26

Author of Crinkler said /TINYHEADER is also an option (doesn't use hashes then).