How Datadog Cut the Size of Its Agent Go Binaries by 77% (opens in new tab)

After the Datadog Agent grew from 428 MiB to 1.22 GiB over a period of 5 years, Datadog engineers set out to reduce its binary size. They discovered that most Go binary bloat comes from hidden dependencies, disabled linker optimizations, and subtle behaviors in the Go compiler and linker.