Date: Sat, 7 Oct 1995 14:35:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: Michael Phelps <morphine AT hops DOT cs DOT jhu DOT edu>
To: "A.Appleyard" <A DOT APPLEYARD AT fs2 DOT mt DOT umist DOT ac DOT uk>
Cc: DJGPP AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: Lots of small files in DJGPP waste space & should be chained up!

There are techniques for reducing the problems associated with large disk 
clusters.  The easiest way is to use a disk compression program such as 
DoubleSpace or Stacker.  Alternatively, you can partition the drive into 
smaller pieces, and this decreases the size of each cluster.  But 
considering that 1.2GB hard drives are running less than $250  these 
days, is it really that big a problem?
						---Michael Phelps, MD
On Sat, 7 Oct 1995, A.Appleyard wrote:

>   The great size of the full DJGPP puts a big strain on people's hard disk
> stores. This is NOT helped by the current practice in many parts of it of
> having stuff on a mass of little files. This has come to a head with me,
> because, having got used to hard disk clusters being 2048 bytes each, my
> department has just got 9 new Pentiums whose hard disk clusters are 32K bytes
> each!! Each little file must start at the start of a cluster. Thus although
> (e.g.) the 40 files in DJGPP\LIBSRC\C\IO\ are only 474 21250 18701 7290 245
> 1647 425 652 1879 3401 3267 1773 1849 458 1061 1269 1682 1892 1326 1434 500
> 581 574 30 7121 1535 512 492 562 1708 920 940 1250 1313 1645 781 714 1888 1570
> 1644 bytes long, each ties up a 32K-byte cluster for itself, total usage 40
> clusters = 1.25 megabytes. But when I chained them all into one file (call it
> say DJGPP\LIBSRC\C\IO.CC) (in that file I deleted many big duplicate copies of
> licences, but altered nothing else), that single file only occupied 81296
> bytes = 3 clusters, well over a megabyte saving!
>   (It would also save bulk in MAKE files, not having to name each of those
> files separately in them.)
>   Repeat this by many of DJGPP's many directories of small or smallish *.C &
> *.CC & *.S files. The space saving for Pentium users would be incredible.
> 
>