Not that rare at all. Take a full disk zip/tar of any Linux/Windows filesystem and you'll encounter a lot of small files.

Ok? How are you comparing these systems to the benchmark so they might be considered relevant? Compressing "Lots of small files" describes an infinite variety of workloads. To achieve anything close to the benchmark you'd need to specifically only compress only small files in a single directory of an average small size. And even the contents of those files would have large implications as to expected performance....

My comment is not making any claims about that. It's just a correction that filesystems with "81k 1KB files" are indeed common.

If that were true, surely it would make sense to demonstrate this directly rather than with a contrived benchmark? The issue is not the preponderance of small files but rather the distribution of data shapes.

That's basically any large source repo.

Zipping up a project directory even without git can be a big file collection. Python virtual environment or node_modules, can quickly get into thousands of small files.

Reading many files (81K in this test) is way slower than reading just one big file. For bigger files, Pack is much faster. Here is a link to some results from a kind contributor: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,66281.m...

(Too long to post here)