While reading about AppNap and the fun tricks Apple employs to improve battery life, I happened across something I never knew: the HFS+ filesystem supports transparent compression. It seems like Apple’s intention was for this to be used for shipping system files, and not applied to user files, as evidenced by the fact that it’s virtually impossible to even figure out if it’s enabled, much less a checkbox to simply turn it on for the filesystem.

But, enter afsctool. (Also available through Homebrew.) Wanting to try it out, I for some reason decided to try to compress the 1.5GB git repo I spend most of my time in at work. Let’s look at compression stats (-v, indirectly) for PHP files (-t php) and then the whole directory:

$ afsctool -vt php .
/Users/Matthew.Wagner/workrepo/.:

File content type: public.php-script
File extension(s): php
Number of HFS+ compressed files: 4895
Total number of files: 4904
File(s) size (uncompressed; reported size by Mac OS 10.6+ Finder): 22705078 bytes / 34.8 MB (megabytes) / 33.2 MiB (mebibytes)
File(s) size (compressed - decmpfs xattr; reported size by Mac OS 10.0-10.5 Finder): 1616066 bytes / 2.1 MB (megabytes) / 2 MiB (mebibytes)
File(s) size (compressed): 5948389 bytes / 6.4 MB (megabytes) / 6.1 MiB (mebibytes)
Compression savings: 73.8%
Approximate total file(s) size (files + file overhead): 9050906 bytes / 9.1 MB (megabytes) / 8.6 MiB (mebibytes)

Number of HFS+ compressed files: 17951
Total number of files: 21797
Total number of folders: 3706
Total number of items (number of files + number of folders): 25503
Folder size (uncompressed; reported size by Mac OS 10.6+ Finder): 1697530893 bytes / 1.75 GB (gigabytes) / 1.63 GiB (gibibytes)
Folder size (compressed - decmpfs xattr; reported size by Mac OS 10.0-10.5 Finder): 1615203435 bytes / 1.62 GB (gigabytes) / 1.51 GiB (gibibytes)
Folder size (compressed): 1628829083 bytes / 1.64 GB (gigabytes) / 1.52 GiB (gibibytes)
Compression savings: 4.0%
Approximate total folder size (files + file overhead + folder overhead): 1648262029 bytes / 1.65 GB (gigabytes) / 1.54 GiB (gibibytes)

The results really shouldn’t be surprising. The .git/ files are already stored compressed, so there’s not much to be gained there, hence an overall savings of only 4% in the repo. PHP files averaged a 73.8% reduction in size thanks to compression… Saving me approximately 30MB on a 512GB disk. Hardly worthwhile, and I have to imagine this is going to come bite me down the road. (Why would I even think that compressing stuff I use hundreds of times a day was a good idea?!) afsctool -d will de-compress a directory, though, so, assuming you don’t corrupt anything, it’s easy enough to roll back things that you compress for no good reason. (You could also use something like ascftool -c -s10 dirname/ to skip files unless they could be compressed more than 10%, to avoid doing the nonsense I did and “compressing” already-compressed files.)

As I referenced in the beginning, I see no way to enable this for newly created files. You can compress the contents of an existing directory, but new stuff written there won’t benefit. It’s possible I haven’t found it yet, but it really feels like compression was intended for Apple to use at install-time.

With that in mind, here was a perhaps-more-reasonable thing to do:

# afsctool -s 10 -vc /Applications/Adobe\ Photoshop\ CC\ 2015
/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CC 2015:
Number of HFS+ compressed files: 7286
Total number of files: 8218
Total number of folders: 2499
Total number of items (number of files + number of folders): 10717
Folder size (uncompressed; reported size by Mac OS 10.6+ Finder): 1887395578 bytes / 1.91 GB (gigabytes) / 1.78 GiB (gibibytes)
Folder size (compressed - decmpfs xattr; reported size by Mac OS 10.0-10.5 Finder): 1030642518 bytes / 1.04 GB (gigabytes) / 991.6 MiB (mebibytes)
Folder size (compressed): 1035466738 bytes / 1.04 GB (gigabytes) / 996.2 MiB (mebibytes)
Compression savings: 45.1%
Approximate total folder size (files + file overhead + folder overhead): 1049476316 bytes / 1.05 GB (gigabytes) / 1000.9 MiB (mebibytes)

I shrunk Photoshop by 45%. Note that some things, like Apple’s iMovie, are already compressed. (Also: why is iMovie on my work laptop?!) It seems like most non-Apple applications are uncompressed, and on average drop somewhere close to 50% in size.

Of course, it’s very clear that, armed with this new hammer, every directory is a nail. Compressing rarely-used applications like Photoshop is probably reasonable; attempting to compress my working git repo was clearly not. Still, a neat tool for your toolbox.