BrowserMetrics

lexcyn (and dave260) Have you tried turning on automatic compression for the BrowserMetrics folder, as I detailed above? (If so, do you have anything notable to report?)

Anyone else?

(I haven’t personally seen any ill effects yet from enabling automatic compression.)

PSA: if you can fulfill the data request from Alexandra-R, please do that first! The sooner the team gets data the sooner they can figure this out.

 - Jim

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Aside: With the explosion (in both usage and number) of plain-text configuration, log, and analytics files in recent years, I wonder if NTFS compression should be used by default in many more places...

[Even with medium-speed SSDs, accessing a compressed file might be faster (fewer IOPS as well), let alone for those poor souls still using HDDs for their boot disk.

I’m not well-versed to know for sure, but memory-mapping files that a program needs extensive access to may contribute to the current disk performance challenges across various ‘modern’ operating systems (in theory and benchmarking, maybe this shouldn’t be a problem due to something like ‘intelligent caching’ in disk and VM systems, but in real-world multi-threaded multi-tasking usage, might not even the most ‘intelligent’ cache prediction system fail to determine user intent in order to optimize performance?).

It shouldn’t be that surprising that browsers such as Chromium-based Edge, in some ways nearly mini-OSs themselves, might end up being a canary for this sort of systemic issue. They are very complex and usage can vary widely by user and time - this isn’t just ‘winword.exe accessing hugereport.doc’ anymore!]

... and all that is aside from the performance impacts of having thousands or more files per process - each one places load on systems and filesystems upon reading (e.g. for each and every file opened, even read-only: verifying access rights, recording ‘atime’ access time, and performing other security/audit logging), writing (most of those same activites, plus updating modification times and file system journals, and perhaps SSD ‘write amplification’), and for purposes of indexing, backup, and security (Windows Defender Real-Time Protection). Many are likely to be left behind when new builds are installed. Sure, some of those things can be disabled on a per-file, directory, or process basis, but... without giving admin rights to the application?

Even if developers of most programs know how to do this, even if allowed to by system security and domain group policy, why would they remember to do this on every release? If using a cross-platform framework, they may not even _be aware_ of these issues, or have an API to address them.