Filesizes differ for every build with dsim/wimlib-imagex

[Vassenego]

Hello, Everyone,
I'm not ashamed to ask real dumb questions, so be prepared!

1. Think of the situation you have an install.wim, you Mount modify it with DISM (Windows 10 ADK 10.1.10586.0) to add some security updates and unmout it again.
2. Then you use wimlib-imagex to compress it ("optimize --recompress --compress:maximum:100").
3. The result is a file with the file size of X Bytes.

Repeat these steps a couple of times... I've got a different file sizes for every run.

Is this normal for working with DISM and wimlib-imagex or am I doing wrong?

Vassenego*.

[synchronicity]

One possibility is that the image's metadata resource compresses to a slightly different size each time because the timestamps are different.

There could be other differences introduced while the image is mounted as well.

There are no differences introduced by 'wimoptimize' itself since that process is deterministic.

[Vassenego]

Hello, and many thanks for your clarification.

It's very interesting that the actual date could be of importance regarding file sizes.

I've thought that the Intel processor would be the difference, because I've seen that an i7-4790@3.60GHz with 8 threads creates larger files than an i5-6440HQ@2.60GHz with 4 threads.

Thanks a lot for your help!