Compressed, symbols take up very little room, in fact they compress as efficiently as any other text. I’ll look at bash with / without them soon and see how low both compress. But I agree, if its your own bandwidth, size might matter.

I think were in a day and age where for most, size does not matter, hence the rant I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m just saying be aware of what exactly you are doing.

I can’t count on all fingers and toes the number of people I have talked to since 2010 who believe strip helps applications use less memory. That’s just scary, considering that I was chastised for not ‘stripping’ MySQL as part of my optimization.

“It runs better if you strip it, everyone knows that” is what they said, which is complete and utter ignorance.

Except for the kernel, of course, because a kernel compiled with DEBUG enabled – and not stripped – is about a GIG in size. The workspace where it was compiled is at least 10 gigs.