[WEB4LIB] File Sizes on the Mac

[Roy Tennant]

On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, Chiara Fox wrote:
[snip]
> I was overwhelmed as I went through the Finder looking at the sizes
> because most of the .html files are already 32k or bigger.  However,
> if I look at the same file in Fetch, GoLive, or even via my server
> logs, the size is only around 10k.
[snip]

This has to do with the way the Mac allocates disk space. The following
Apple Technical Information Library Note:

http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n8647

has this to say about it (in part):

"In both the Macintosh and DOS environment, the maximum number of blocks
on a driver is 65,536 because both Operating Systems address the
allocation blocks with a 16-bit address. Drives larger than 512 MB cannot
use a block size of 8K or less because there just aren't enough addresses.
Thus, if a 2 GB drive is one Macintosh partition, the smallest file size
allowed is 32K. (If you save a TeachText file with one character in it, it
would take up 32K of disk space.) This means that the size of your hard
drive determines the minimum size of each file."

So the Mac filesystem is not where you should determine the actual
file sizes.
Roy Tennant 


On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, Chiara Fox wrote:

> Hello Everyone-
> 
> I was going though the files on my Institute's Website to determine 
> which ones need to be optimized.  My goal is to get the files down to 
> Jakob Nielsen's 36k in total (meaning HTML plus images).
> 
> I was overwhelmed as I went through the Finder looking at the sizes 
> because most of the .html files are already 32k or bigger.  However, 
> if I look at the same file in Fetch, GoLive, or even via my server 
> logs, the size is only around 10k.
> 
> I seem to remember hearing that the Mac Finder "lies" about the true 
> file size.  Does anyone know if this is true?  Do you know what size 
> I should believe?  If the file is really only 10k, I don't have to 
> worry.  But if it's 32k I have a lot of work to do.
> 
> Thanks for your help!
> 
> -Chiara Fox
> __________________________
> Technical Services Librarian
> The Rowland Institute for Science
> Cambridge, Massachusetts
> 617.497.4616
> 617.497.4627 (fax)
> http://www.rowland.org/
>