Why My Install Zip Won't Upload: 89MB, and Half Is a PDF Library's Fonts

#php #opensource #architecture #discuss

My install package is 89MB. A lot of Japanese shared hosts cap uploads somewhere between 2 and 50MB. So the simplest distribution path I offer — download a zip, upload it through a control panel — just doesn't work for a chunk of the people I built it for.

Docker never told me this. A container doesn't care about a 90MB layer. A shared host's upload form does, and that's a constraint my whole dev setup was structurally blind to.

I blamed the wrong fonts

My first instinct was the heading fonts. The app bundles IPAex for headings — a few megabytes of TTF — and that was the obvious suspect. I even had a build report that agreed with me and pointed the finger there.

Then I actually unzipped the release and measured.

IPAex wasn't the problem. The heading fonts were about 9MB compressed — real, but not the story. The story was the PDF library's bundled CJK fonts. Two files alone:

Sun-ExtA.ttf — about 22MB on disk
Sun-ExtB.ttf — about 17MB on disk

Those two, plus the rest of that library's font directory, were the single largest region of the package by a wide margin — roughly half the compressed zip. I'd been ready to optimize the 9MB I could see instead of the 40MB I couldn't, because I trusted a summary instead of the artifact.

Lesson one, before anything else: when something is too big, measure where the bytes actually are. Not where a report says. Where unzip -v says.

Why the fonts can't just go

The tempting move is "delete the giant fonts." I can't.

The app generates PDF invoices, and it has to render Japanese — including the rare Extension-B kanji that show up in real personal and place names (the kind where someone's surname uses a character most fonts don't have). Drop those fonts and the invoice renders tofu — little empty boxes — for exactly the customers whose names are unusual. For a compliance document, that's not a cosmetic bug. It's wrong output.

So the fonts are load-bearing. The size isn't waste; it's the cost of rendering a whole writing system correctly.

The design (which I have not shipped)

Here's where I have to be careful, because it would be easy to write this as a finished story. It isn't one.

What I've designed — and written up as an architecture decision, not yet built — is a deferred font pack:

Ship only the minimal fonts the PDF engine needs to boot, plus the small heading set. That gets the base package under typical upload limits.
Publish the big CJK fonts as a separate, versioned, signed artifact. Verify it on arrival with a SHA-256 and a bundled public key; refuse to use it if the signature doesn't match.
Fetch it two ways: server-side over HTTPS by default, with a manual upload fallback for hosts that block outbound connections.
Fail closed. Before generating a PDF, check that the required fonts are present. If they're missing and can't be fetched, don't emit a tofu invoice — stop with a clear error.

That's the plan. The architecture decision is written down and currently marked proposed; the implementation issue is open; there is no slimmed build yet.

Which means I'm not going to tell you it dropped to 20MB or 40MB or any number, because I haven't built it and measured it. I've seen enough of my own writing lately claim outcomes that hadn't happened. The honest version is: here's an 89MB problem, here's where the bytes are, and here's the design I'm going to try. If the slimmed number turns out interesting, that's a follow-up post with a real measurement in it.

The takeaway that generalizes

Two things I'll actually carry forward:

Distribution size is a first-class constraint, and Docker hides it. If you ship anything people install by hand — a plugin, a zip, an appliance — the size limit lives in someone's upload form, and your container-based workflow will never surface it. Put it in CI or a checklist, because you won't feel it otherwise.

Optimize the measured bytes, not the visible ones. The fonts I could name were not the fonts that mattered. I nearly spent effort on the 9MB in front of me because I hadn't opened the box.

What's unexpectedly blown up an artifact or image size for you — and when you finally measured, was it the thing you first blamed?

── Hideyuki Mori (Ayane International) 🔗 hideyuki-mori.com