General , another settlement needs your help , here , I ' ll mark it on your map . <| sep |> A few ways . To begin with , all files , no matter the size of their actual contents , have a minimum file size . This size is basically the metadata information , including things such as telling the computer and software what type of file it is , information about date of creation , last date of access , and last date of modification , among other things . As well , the creation of a file , regardless of how little may be inside of it , isn ' t free . It takes a small amount of computing power to create the file in memory RAM , not physical and it takes time to write the file to disc physical memory , and it takes a small amount of time and space to create the index entry for the file so the computer knows where to look for it . If too many blank files are created , you end up having a lot of these empty and useless files in memory and being written to disk , which can slow down performance .