Compressing them this way however makes situation worse for memory manager.
If you use uncompressed (or transparently compressed by the filesystem) binary, your process has mmaped the memory pages, which can be discarded and then reloaded, as needed.
If you use self-extractor, your process has dirty pages that it itself wrote, that cannot be discarded, but must be moved to swap if needed.
The more you use the same executable for multiple processes, the worse the effect is. The ro mmaped pages are shared among them all, the written pages are private to each process.
I would be surprised to see practical performance degradation in uncompressing executable code before jumping to the program on today's machine. The largest binary in my /usr/bin/ is 50 megabytes. On the other hand, for very, very large binaries it's probably faster to decompress in memory rather than load all the bits from disk.
Further, most executables aren't static these days. (I often wish they were, though!). What type of binaries have you got, and are they really so big that it's worth the hassle to compress them just to save disk space?
The binaries are mostly stuff like pandoc and compiled statically so that I can run them anywhere. Nothing too special.
Its not technically needed, but it makes network transfer faster and in general thats good enough. Its not really intended to reduce disk space really, just more a way to make things more manageable.
Curious — which network transfer protocol are you using that doesn’t support compression on the fly? And if its just for transfer, why not gzip instead?
UPX is usually better than other generic compression utilities. IIRC it actually modifies the executable before compressing it to provide better compression. I think on Windows it reversibly changes relative addresses to absolute addresses so you get better compression rates.
2GiB quotas on home directories is another reason, but explaining it all on hn isn't really a goal of mine. Suffice it to say there are a confluence of issues. As to network compression via ssh say versus compression of the binary, time it you might be surprised at the difference.
You'd be suprised at how much of an elf binary is all 0's.