{"id":24663,"date":"2007-10-29T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-29T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/10\/29\/why-doesnt-explorer-show-recursive-directory-size-as-an-optional-column\/"},"modified":"2007-10-29T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-29T10:00:00","slug":"why-doesnt-explorer-show-recursive-directory-size-as-an-optional-column","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20071029-00\/?p=24663","title":{"rendered":"Why doesn&#039;t Explorer show recursive directory size as an optional column?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/12\/28\/336219.aspx#345978\">Why start up another program to see folder sizes, when they should just be right there, in Explorer, all the time?<\/a>&#8221;\n The same reason <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2005\/01\/11\/350628.aspx\"> \\\\ does not autocomplete to all the computers on the network<\/a>: Because it would destroy corporate networks.\n Showing folder sizes &#8220;all the time&#8221; means that when you open, say, the root of a large server, Explorer would start running around recursively enumerating every single directory on the server in order to compute the folder sizes.  One person doing this to a server is bad enough. Imagine if hundreds of people did it simultaneously: The server would be hammered continously.\n Even worse: imagine doing this across a limited-bandwidth link like a VPN or an overseas link. The link would be saturated with file enumerations and wouldn&#8217;t have any bandwidth remaining for &#8220;real work&#8221;. Even the change-notifications that Explorer registers are <a href=\"http:\/\/support.microsoft.com\/?kbid=330929\"> cause for much hair-pulling on corporate networks<\/a>. (And these are change-notifications, which are passive.)\n Even on a home computer, computing folder sizes automatically is is still not a good idea. How would you like it if opening a folder caused Explorer to start churning your disk computing all the folder sizes recursively? (Then again, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/noahc\/archive\/2007\/02\/26\/folder-size-for-windows-explorer.aspx\"> maybe you don&#8217;t mind, in which case, go nuts<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p> (Of course, the question sidesteps the question the linked article tries to address, namely, &#8220;What do you mean by the size of a directory anyway?&#8221;) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Why start up another program to see folder sizes, when they should just be right there, in Explorer, all the time?&#8221; The same reason \\\\ does not autocomplete to all the computers on the network: Because it would destroy corporate networks. Showing folder sizes &#8220;all the time&#8221; means that when you open, say, the root [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-24663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>&#8220;Why start up another program to see folder sizes, when they should just be right there, in Explorer, all the time?&#8221; The same reason \\\\ does not autocomplete to all the computers on the network: Because it would destroy corporate networks. Showing folder sizes &#8220;all the time&#8221; means that when you open, say, the root [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}