Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin@cygwin.com X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: cygwin@cygwin.com From: Rolf Campbell Subject: Re: SPARSE files considered harmful - please revert Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 12:11:13 -0400 Lines: 34 Message-ID: References: <16072.892.778395.24290@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <009001c31d93$b61d08e0$78d96f83@pomello> Reply-To: IDontLikePersonalReplies@hotmail.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: <009001c31d93$b61d08e0$78d96f83@pomello> Max Bowsher wrote: > Martin Buchholz wrote: > >>As a result, a non-empty but small sparse file takes up a minimum of >>16*clustersize bytes on the disk. My measurements suggest an overhead >>of 32kb per file with a cluster size of 4kb. > > > I just thought I'd throw a few more numbers into the debate: > > I patched Cygwin to respond to CYGWIN=sparse / CYGWIN=nosparse > Then, I did a cvs co winsup: > > "Size on disc" of checked out dir, as shown in Windows properties box: > Sparse: 40.7MB > Not sparse: 43.6MB > OK, so sparse seems to win? But that makes no sense - backed up by noting > that for various individual sparse files, "Size on disc" is reporting a size > which is not an integer number of clusters. > > Now, Properties of disc, look at "Used space": > Difference in creating sparse checkout: ~ 200MB !!! > Difference in creating normal checkout: ~ 40MB > > Personally, I'm inclined to trust the overall disc stats more. > > I think this evidence suggests that sparse files should NOT be on by default > in Cygwin. I just checked out a corporate build system, which had average file size much bigger. It decreases the available disk space by 300Megs with non-sparce files, and 390Megs with sparce files. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/