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On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Steve Landess wrote:

In your case, the "allocated" size is probably the _minimum_ amount of storage than can be allocated for the IFS object...it is probably the "cluster size" on the disk, or the minimum number of sectors that must be allocated for an IFS object.

This phenomenon can also be observed on any PC hard disk...open a text editor, put a single character into a text document, and save it to disk...then go back and see how much storage it occupies.

As a test, I just used Notepad to create a text file named XXX.TXT, and put a single 'A' into it.
when I use DIR to view the files in the folder, it shows a size of 5. However, when I use Explorer to view the properties of the file, it says that 4096 bytes are allocated, so on my PC the cluster size is probably 4096 bytes.

I got curious and did basically the same thing on my linux box which uses the XFS filesystem from SGI. I did this:


cat > onebyte
a<control-C>

which resulted in a lower case "a" being put into the file "onebyte". I verified this by opening onebyte in ghex. Looking at the file with ls gives interesting results:

james@stumpy:~> ls -l onebyte
-rw-r--r--  1 james users 1 Jan 24 13:44 onebyte

This shows a size of 1.  But adding the -s argument to ls gives:

james@stumpy:~> ls -ls onebyte
4 -rw-r--r--  1 james users 1 Jan 24 13:44 onebyte

which shows that the file occupies 4 1024-byte blocks.

XFS has a website at http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/ if you want to know more about it.

I believe other filesystems (perhaps ReiserFS?) allocate space in such a way that many small files do not occupy unnecessary disk space. Perhaps hosting your files on some other machine and exporting them via NFS is a good solution? Disk would be a whole lot cheaper.

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw

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