Excessive File Size in Generated Protobuf Files

[zhuiyi9009]

I’ve noticed that the protobuf files generated by the tool are significantly large. Upon investigation, I found that each generated proto file redundantly includes the entire content of imported protos. As a result, this duplicated data is present in every single file, leading to bloated file sizes.

Expected Behavior: It would be more efficient if the imported protos were separately generated as standalone code, and other protos could reference them instead of duplicating the information within each file.

[tomas-abrahamsson]

Is your proto structure like this:

A.proto imports B.proto, C.proto, D.proto etc,
and you generate code for A, B, C and D?

You could then generate only A.proto. If you need messages from B, C or D, they are available via A.

[zhuiyi9009]

thanks for reply.

My proto file includes common.proto, which is a file containing many structures. Other protocol files reference this file through import, resulting in all the generated files containing this information. As a result, the size of the generated files has become quite large

[tomas-abrahamsson]

The issue about large files has been up a few times before, so I might be taking a look at it, but it will likely take me some time.