Question

If I have 2 files each with this:

“Hello World” (x 1000)

Does that take up more space than 1 file with this:

“Hello World” (x 2000)

What are the drawbacks of dividing content into multiple smaller files (assuming there’s reason to divide them into more files, not like this example)?

Update:

I’m using a Macbook Pro, 10.5. But I’d also like to know for Ubuntu Linux.

Answer 1

Marcelos gives the general performance case. I’d argue worrying about this is premature optimization. you should split things into different files where it is logical to split them.

also if you really care about file size of such repetitive files then you can compress them.
your example even hints at this, a simple run length encoding of

“Hello World”x1000

is much more space efficient than actually having “hello world” written out 1000 times.