As of the v0.66 of PowerToys, core runtime dlls are being shipped self-contained as a part of PowerToys. During the installation process, hard-links are being created for every module that needs any of these shared libraries.
Our main motivations for doing are the following:
- Be able to install PowerToys without UAC elevation
- PowerToys has a reduced disk space when components are shared.
- Reduce additional downloads for dependencies
These dll's are installed in <PowerToysInstallDir>/dll/<Item> folder structure.
Before the hard-link work was done, each of these runtimes had to be installed, so there were more items being installed outside just the PowerToys install directory. This space would not have been accounted.
File Explorer treats hard-links the same as "original"/regular files/directories (https://learn.microsoft.com/troubleshoot/windows-server/backup-and-storage/disk-space-problems-on-ntfs-volumes#other-ntfs-features-that-may-cause-file-allocation-confusion), not as links. This results in File Explorer reporting size of PowerToys installation directory bigger than it is (more than 2GB).
As of v0.66 of PowerToys, the installed footprint is ~660MB.
When we were prototyping and validating, here was our running table of results and why we took the route we did.
| Moment | Installer size | App size | Installation dir size | Real size | Deps downloaded and installed during PT install | Total (installer size + real size + deps downloaded and installed during PT install) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| v0.62.0.1 no deps self-contained |
125 MB | 817 MB | 529 MB | 534 MB | 418 MB | 1,077 MB |
| v0.63.0 WAS and VCRedist |
83 MB | 587 MB | 567 MB | 396 MB | 394 MB | 873 MB |
| v0.63.0 WAS1.2preview and VCRedist |
80 MB | 574 MB | 539 MB | 385 MB | 394 MB | 859 MB |
| Full Test WAS, VCRedist, .NET |
149 MB | 705 MB | 1,760 MB | 557 MB | 0 MB | 706 MB |
We created a quick virtual machine. We chose to use our fresh Windows 10 test virtual machines here.
As mentioned above, File Explorer shows size of PowerToys installation dir as every hard-link is a regular file for itself
Real disk usage of PowerToys is shown by inspecting disk usage after installing PowerToys. Used space is now 695MB, comparing to ~35MB used space for empty disk gives us the size of ~660MB for PowerToys installation dir.
Size of regular files (non-hard-links) and hard-links can also be obtained by running following PowerShell command in PowerToys installation dir:
Regular files:
ls -Recurse -File -force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | ? LinkType -ne HardLink | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum
Hard-links
ls -Recurse -File -force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | ? LinkType -e HardLink | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum
Running these commands for PowerToys v0.66 shows that size of regular files is way less than size of hard-links pointing to some of those regular files because PowerShell (same as File Explorer) also takes the size of hard-links as of regular files.
