ftrace is a useful debugging utility, and can be configured with little impact on performance, with extra per-function NOPs added and used as tracing trampolines.
Building the SLE15SP2 kernel (I'd expect similar for mainline) with ftrace enabled results in the following size increase:
before: 4239920 ./arch/x86/boot/bzImage
after: 4870704 ./arch/x86/boot/bzImage