Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Adding 322 mb of data to the registry isn't going to be healthy for windows either.

Registry hives expand but don't contract again. The registry is effectively held entirely in RAM. You are therefore effectively wasting 322 mb of RAM even when KSP isn't running.

View on HN

Is there a tool like WinDirStat/WizTree but for the registry?

I'm surprised they didn't just shoved it in SQLite and called it a day. It's public domain.

NIH I guess. Or maybe some old fart in company doesn't want to let go off their abomination.

You're surprised Microsoft doesn't replace the registry with SQLite in Windows?

If so, you might not be aware quite how many millions of entries are in the hierarchical key value database that is the registry, and quite how critical read-write latency is.

sqlite can do clever things like multiple indexes and full text search, but won't beat the windows registry on the performance front at the narrow usecase it was designed for.

SQLite only has two types: INTEGER, BLOB (all other SQL types are implicitly converted to/from BLOB). Registry has many types: SZ, WORD, DWORD, QWORD, BINARY.

I remember registry starting to crap out and be slow at barely few hundred megabytes. Admittely that was some time ago but still.

I remember it used to be an optimization thing in Windows 9x to compact the registry on startup. I am surprised that it's not really resolved.

You can still do it manually, but you need a bootable disk to do so:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...

Somewhere, there are Microsoft devs WTFing over crash reports indicating registry is over a gig.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com