BrowserMetrics

lexcynHow far apart are the dates/times on your files? [Unless my quick math is wrong, 12,000 files over 2 days (48 hours) would be 250/hour, or a new file every 15 seconds or less. Even if over 4 days (96 hours), that is 125 files/hour, still over 2 new files _per minute_.]

dave260 Here's probably why the NTFS file compression isn't working for you:

• When NTFS compression is enabled on a file:
  • The file is broken up into small sections
  • Every time one of those sections is written to,
    • The data for that section (including any changes being saved) are compressed in RAM.
      • If the compressed size is smaller than the size of the uncompressed data, the compressed section is written to disk.
      • If the compressed size is about the same or larger than the uncompressed data, that section is written uncompressed
• What I think Edge is doing:
  • Creates a new empty 4MB file
  • 'Memory-maps' that file to an area of memory so that Edge can write to it directly
  • Each time it has a drop of 'metrics' data, it stores it in RAM
    • Since the file is 'memory-mapped', the system (Windows' virtual memory subsystem and/or the CPU's internal Memory Management Unit) automatically writes the changed data to disk, some small number of bytes at a time
  • Since only a tiny bit of data is changing at any one moment, NTFS compression doesn't bother with it (guesses: because it's either too small, because by itself it doesn't compress well, or because it never really works for memory-mapped files)

If you were to turn off compression for your entire BrowserMetrics folder and its contents, and them immediately turned it back on, I think you'd find that all existing files would be greatly compressed, but new files would not. So much for that idea!