Four endpoints, one Postgres query, no fancy dependencies as far as I know. go build gives me 14MB, which surprised me because everyone talks about Go producing small self-contained binaries. Coming from Python where the file is 400 lines and that's the whole thing. Is this expected or did I import something enormous by accident?
Check your import graph before you optimise the linker flags. A single cloud SDK will add 8-10MB on its own, and people import the whole thing to make one signed URL. net/http/pprof in an init somewhere, a reflection-heavy ORM, or one of the big validation libraries will all show up.
Went from 31MB to 12MB by replacing one SDK import with a hand written request signer. Took an afternoon and I'd only do it if the size actually mattered to something.
UPX will squash it to around 4MB if you genuinely need it small for something like an embedded box or a CLI people download over a bad connection. Costs you a decompress on every start and antivirus products flag packed binaries constantly, so I would not do it for a server.
In a container it matters even less than you'd think. Static binary on scratch or distroless gives you a ~15MB image total, and the layer barely changes between deploys if you cache dependencies properly. I've stopped caring below about 50MB.
Just use TinyGo, it produces binaries about a tenth the size.
TinyGo doesn't support the full standard library, and net/http server support in particular is not something you'd want to bet a service on. It's for microcontrollers and wasm.
@easy_pace_ellis · 11mo ago · 3 replies
Expected. You're shipping the whole runtime, the garbage collector, and everything statically linked, so a hello-world is already about 2MB before you write any code. 14MB for a real service with a database driver is normal.
Easy trim:
go build -ldflags="-s -w"drops the symbol table and DWARF info, usually 25-30% off. You lose readable stack traces in some tooling, which I'd think about before doing it in production.And the comparison that matters is not against a 400-line .py file, it's against the Python interpreter plus site-packages you have to install on the target box.
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@committee_kim · 11mo ago
Before you strip anything, run
go tool nm -size -sort size yourbinary | head -40. It tells you what actually took the space, and about half the time it's one dependency you forgot you pulled in.go version -m yourbinarylists the module versions baked in too.Reply
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@flashcard_fen · 11mo ago
Fair, when I put it that way my "small" Python service is a 900MB container image.
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