I am quite curious about why locale-archive files are preferred in many Linux distros and what and to which extent its advantage over compiled files for each locale would be.
What's the advantage of locale archives over locale files spread out in directories?
filesystems;locale;glibc
The locale-archive files contain the languages usedover the system  man pages for example. This memory-mapping enablesreading the file as it's in memory, avoiding system callsused to perform disk-read operations, therefore it can result in much fasteraccess. Memory-mapped files (like shared libraries) are kind of part of the virtual memory of processes like the top command, VIRTfield.So, the part of the locale-archive file mapped tomemory adds up to the virtual memory of every processes that makes useof glibc (basically everything), while this is actually only once inmemory.At last, for each processes, the virtual memoryoverestimates the real memory of the process by, the amount of  part ofthe locale-archive file which is memory-mapped.