IronWrap Considerations

SoftwareShield System Feature Guide > IronWrapping > IronWrap Considerations

## IronWrap Considerations

IronWrapping your product will change its footprint (size on disk). Normally it will increase in size slightly, but in some cases, depending on your design it may actually shrink it. There are several factors which go into how your protected applications footprint will change. These include:

- What the binary architecture of the protected (host) exe is, how large it is to begin with and if it uses CodeRivets and how many there are in the exe.

- Which (if any) binaries you choose to embed inside your host exe.

- Which (if any) data files you choose to embed inside your host exe.

- Which, if any, compression algorithm(s) you choose for your host exe, any embedded binaries and any embedded data files. Each file may use a different algorithm.

- Which license model you choose (if you choose one of the pre-defined license models).

- The size of the UI elements you design into the IronWrapping system (if any)

- How many languages you embed into the UI elements of the protected application. Each added language can add several hundred KB &endash; but this again depends almost entirely on how tightly you design your UI.

It is important to note that each of the provided compression algorithms (ZLIB, LZMA, NATIVE, and JCALG) will perform differently depending upon the type of file they are applied to. The actual compression ratio is only part of each algorithms performance characteristics &endash; the speed of compression and decompression is the other half. For more detailed information about compression performance characteristics, see the help file section: "SoftwareShield System Feature Guide > IronWrapping > IronWrap Protection > Compression". Also note if you which, you can even plug-in your own compression algorithm to the IronWrapping system.

Bottom line: The size change depends on many factors &endash; however for most typical programs, license designs and options configurations, you can expect your program to roughly stay the same size or grow by up to 1 MB. In some cases it may be more and in others it will actually shrink. Regardless, you will find that the sophisticated IronWrapping system allows you to embed and compress your programs and supporting systems so efficiently, that a huge, valuable amount of protection and control is added to the application with a minimum footprint change.