Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jeromegv 483 days ago
Everyone misunderstood your comment for a reason.

You wrote: but it only found 1GB of savings on a 8.1GB folder.

It’s quite a saving and that’s what everyone understood from your comment.

1 comments

I think this is somewhat funny.

His comment is pretty understandable if you've done frontend work in javascript.

Node_modules is so ripe for duplicate content that some tools explicitly call out that they're disk efficient (It's literally in the tagline for PNPM "Fast, disk space efficient package manager": https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm)

So he got ok results (~13% savings) on possibly the best target content available in a user's home directory.

Then he got results so bad it's utterly not worth doing on the rest (0.10% - not 10%, literally 1/10 of a single percent).

---

Deduplication isn't super simple, isn't always obviously better, and can require other system resources in unexpected ways (ex - lots of CPU and RAM). It's a cool tech to fiddle with on a NAS, and I'm generally a fan of modern CoW filesystems (incl APFS).

But I want to be really clear - this is people picking spare change out of the couch style savings. Penny wise, pound foolish. The only people who are likely to actually save anything buying this app probably already know it, and have a large set of real options available. Everyone else is falling into the "download more ram" trap.