An analysis of how static and shared libraries affect memory usage on an IP-STB

Abstract

An IP-STB is a small and stand alone embedded system which is able to provide a series of advanced entertaining services. However, like an ordinary embedded system, an IP-STB still has to bear with extremely main memory constraints and no disk space. Normally, advanced features provided by an IP-STB require a large amount of limited main memory, therefore how to maintain a small static memory footprint and low memory usage becomes very important. Libraries composed of shared code contribute to a significant amount of memory consumption. Libraries can be categorized into two types: static libraries and shared libraries. Both of them have their pros and cons in terms of memory usage and system performance. However, there is no existing generic method to determine when and why to choose one type over the other one. To address this problem, a series of tools were implemented to give a quantitative analysis of how different types of libraries affect the system memory usage. Besides, their advantages and disadvantages were discussed and compared. In addition to the above, the optimization of shared libraries was also investigated.