morgon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

is there a way to estimate the disk space the installation of a module would take without actually installing it?

What I mean id the module itself and all dependencies that would be newly installed.

I assume an exact number is impossible as the installation size of xs-modules is probably hard to predict, but is there a way to at least get a good approximation?

Many thanks!

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Re: module installation size
by 1nickt (Canon) on May 11, 2018 at 09:44 UTC

    I know of no such way, other than writing a program to get the data from MetaCPAN, which has the dependencies and the tarballs. Myself, if anything, I've been concerned about memory footprint, not disk usage.


    The way forward always starts with a minimal test.
[reply]
      Myself, if anything, I've been concerned about memory footprint, not disk usage.
      Sure, but at the moment I am playing on a Fire 7 tablet where currently perl-modules go to the interal storage, so disk usage is a (slight) concern for me.
[reply]
        Fire 7 tablet where currently perl-modules go to the interal storage

        Should be Unix-based, i.e. Android or something like that. Find the modules directory, move it to an SD card, and replace it by a symlink to the directory on the SD card.

        Come back when the 256 GByte SD card is full. ;-)

        Alexander

        --
        Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)
[reply]
Re: module installation size
by Anonymous Monk on May 11, 2018 at 10:51 UTC
    A fat distribution (size cpan) is only a couple hundred mb, smaller if you avoid generating html/manpages (one or more dist authors generated both for win32). -- afk
[reply]

      Your link doesn't go to a specific thread. Are you talking about minicpan?

[reply]

        Now that I am not away from keyboard I can elaborate

        I'm talking about a fat distribution :) ex a strawberryperl , stock distribution is only 108.3 MB tarball, 335mb(357mb on disk), only ~130mb of which is perl , 100mb is perl modules (core plus 472), and 221MB for mingw/libs...

        So that is 100mb module to 221mb dependencies, or 1:2

        Or 108.3 MB compressed to / 335 uncompressed, or 1:3

        If a dummy generates both html and manpages (  perl -V:"install.*" ) then the size almost doubles :)(its all wasted MB for me, )

        A mingw/msys dev environment might be another 389MB

        compared to 1-2-3GB for minicpan size (it grows), and when a regular user installs bunches and bunches of module on top, short of installing all of minicpan (1-2-3GB), its only about 500MB

        A snapshot i took a few years ago listed 7789 packages , which translated to 1039 distributions , or 124MB worth of cpan distribution tarballs (including dual lived),

        It installs to 508MB. 110Mb vendor, 30.7MB lib, 367MB site

        So installed size might be 3x or 4x bigger than the size of the tarball but actual average might actually be 2x to 3x actualllyyyyyy

        A smaller example , worst case of balooning of sorts 

        442kb for XML-LibXML-2.0014.tar.gz 
uncompressed size 1.90MB size 
uncompressed size on disk 2.42MB

after building/make dance its
3.52 MB (3,693,052 bytes) / 4.16 MB (4,370,432 bytes)

after installation its
663 KB / 760KB

plus 25MB in prerequisites ( libxml2mingw  )
560kb includes
8.09MB dll/exe (the minimal true prerequisite)
8.14MB libs (.a)
7.51MB share (docs...)

        [download]

        So 442kb tarball / expands to 1.90MB size / builds to 3.52 MB / installs to 663 KB

        So 442kb tarball / expands to 1.90MB size / builds to 3.52 MB / installs to 8.09MB+ 663 KB

        So 442kb tarball / installs to 8.09MB+ 663 KB

        So 442KB/9MB or 1:20 balooning ratio

        Or worse yet 25MB/760KB = 32.89

        So 3x/4x average, 20x or worst case without pod generated manpages+html, or maybe 33x worst case

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