Alias sizes have been fixed?

[EmilyED]

I think it was with Leopard that alias sizes on Mac ballooned, usually well over a megabyte in size. But I just upgraded to Sierra and alias sizes are now back to being tiny (for newly created; it doesn't convert old ones).

I did some googling but can't find any comment on this. Does anybody know the details?

 

[Gregg2]

I didn't notice aliases being huge in Leopard or Snow Leopard. I think you had "issues". But, do you know of this being a widespread problem?

 

[neeklamy]

I remember this, but it was some time ago and I don’t recall when aliases bloated up.

Over on the Apple Support Communities there’s this from 2012:

Why are alias files so big now? Before (OSX 10.3), they were rarely bigger than 1 KB, but now (OSX 10.7), they're often up to 1.6 MB! Can we do something to keep them small?

– Apple Support Communities: Why are Finder alias files so huge lately?

On the Ask Different site there’s this Q&A:

I noticed the alias(es) that I create in Mountain Lion are very big in filesize (for example an alias to a folder is 5.8MB!)

Compared to Leopard, they were just about 500KB.

Since Lion, in addition to storing Retina icons, it seems that an alias stores its many different sizes of icons in both the data and the resource fork (the xattr com.apple.ResourceFork). Possibly in a move away from Resource forks, while still supporting previous OSes (for now).

– Ask Different: Why are the alias so big in filesize in Mountain Lion?

While a typical alias under the classic Mac OS was small, between 1 and 5 KB, under macOS it can be fairly large, more than 5000 KB for the alias to a folder.

– Wikipedia: Alias (Mac OS)

Some speculation over on Super User on whether the Finder was being truthful (talks about resource forks), ‘Why are Mac OS X alias files so large?’ and some thoughts on what aliases were pointing to in this Snow Leopard era question, ‘Size of Alias files’.

It looks like the alias sizes crept upwards since 10.5. And disappointingly I couldn’t find any mention of wayward alias sizes in any of the otherwise thorough John Siracusa Mac OS X reviews. The closest thing is a mention in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard review: Time Machine Internals (but no mention of file sizes).