>>I do question how important it is any more in most applications to bum code down that relentlessly. Process control code or loops that execute bazillions of times, sure. But for a typical business app what difference does it make how big the EXE is? When terabyte drives go for a song that has fallen off my radar. Am I mistaken?
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>Well, with typical business apps, you can just look in Task Manager at memory and CPU utilization. As long as memory in use is less than the amount physically installed, it makes no difference. And for CPU, most business workstations are rarely over 5% utilization.

Disk defragmentation is very easy on the core. FTP too. Yet both take time.

IOW, nowadays the optimization isn't that much in reducing the memory footprint or the size of the executable, it's in the number of disk accesses and trips across the wire.