= Size does matter =
In some cases (e.g. internet distribution) you'll want your distribution to be as small as possible, and here are some tips for achieving this.

'''Note''': the following methods all require passing options to py2exe. Check out PassingOptionsToPy2Exe and ListOfOptions for more information about passing options.
Also, at the end of the page is a code example including everything discussed here.

= Compression =
For the price of running a tad slower, you can compress the library zip using the ''compress'' option.

= Encodings =
py2exe automatically includes the entire encodings library in the distribution. If you're '''absolutely sure''' you won't need to deal with Unicode (or any kind of encoding) you can specify ''ascii=True'', saving a lot of space by excluding the encodings.

= Exclude _ssl =
Since the socket module imports the _ssl module, every program using sockets will include the _ssl.pyd dll, which is pretty big. If you're using sockets but don't need ssl, specify ''excludes=['_ssl']''.

= Exclude standard libraries =
py2exe also includes many unnecessary standard modules and libraries. There are 2 steps you can take in order to save this space:
== Exclude big modules ==
The following modules take a lot of space and are seldom used in distributions:
 * doctest
 * pdb
 * unittest
 * difflib
 * inspect
If you're not using some or all of them, you can add them to the ''excludes'' list.

== Do it yourself ==
Of course, another (and probably better) way to do this is simply open the library.zip file py2exe created and look for big modules/packages, then add them to the ''excludes'' list.
For example, I had the pyreadline package installed, and it ended up being included in full, even though the program doesn't use it at all.

= Exclude msvcr71.dll =
In Python versions before 2.6, py2exe puts the MS Visual C runtime DLL in your distribution folder. Since most Windows installations nowadays include this DLL by default, it may be unnecessary.
So again, only if you're '''absolutely sure''' everyone using the program will already have msvcr71.dll, specify ''dll_excludes=['msvcr71.dll']''.

= Example =
Here is an example - my setup script, which resulted in a total size of 2.15 MB, 2.01 of which are the Python DLL (which of course can't be excluded).
{{{
#! python
from distutils.core import setup
import py2exe

import sys; sys.argv.append('py2exe')

py2exe_options = dict(
                      ascii=True,  # Exclude encodings
                      excludes=['_ssl',  # Exclude _ssl
                                'pyreadline', 'difflib', 'doctest', 'locale', 
                                'optparse', 'pickle', 'calendar'],  # Exclude standard library
                      dll_excludes=['msvcr71.dll'],  # Exclude msvcr71
                      compressed=True,  # Compress library.zip
                      )

setup(name='<Name>',
      version='1.0',
      description='<Description>',
      author='Ofer Schwarz',

      console=['script.py'],
      options={'py2exe': py2exe_options},
      )
}}}