Not an expert but I thought I would share my thoughts based on experience. When you look at the size of a file it's stored in actual metadata of the file so it can be accessed quickly however since a folder is a collection of files it can't easily keep that info. Once you ask the is what the size it is has to go and add up the values of each file contained in it. This can take a bit of time especially with larger folders so if windows constantly calculated the size of every folder it would just waste resources and make everything painfully slow. Again not an expert this is just how I think it happens.
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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Yeah, I'd say for the same reason that big enough folders can take several minutes to hours to actually give you their sizes.
You're correct. An expert might have used some fancy words like "recursion" or "computational complexity", but would have expressed essentially the same idea.
OP, to solve your problem, use a program like TreeSize.
Or windirstat
I used wiztree, orders of magnitude faster
Neat! I'll have to try that next time i need to work on a windows machine.
Qdirstat is what i use on linux which is the OG afaik. Its actually what windirstat was porting over when it was initially made. Its insanely fast for me
Because showing the folder size requires scanning all the files in it, as well as all the files in all it's subfolders. For some folders that could mean tens of thousands of files. Which would take quite some time.
There are ways to speed that up. But you'd be scanning all the files, all the time to keep a database updated.
Basically, it's a lot of overhead
This. macOS does do folder sizes. It rarely shows because it takes forever. Maybe if the drive was formatted APFS it would be faster? Not sure though. My drives are NTFS and exFAT.