SPARSE files considered harmful - please revert
Rolf Campbell
rcampbell@tropicnetworks.com
Tue May 20 17:07:00 GMT 2003
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.
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