Endianness

Byte Order

The order in which bytes are stored in memory or files — big-endian (MSB first) or little-endian (LSB first).

Technical Detail

Endianness measurement uses two systems: decimal (SI: 1 KB = 1,000 bytes, used by storage manufacturers and macOS) and binary (IEC: 1 KiB = 1,024 bytes, used by Windows and most programming languages). This discrepancy means a '500 GB' drive shows ~465 GB in Windows. In web development, payload size directly affects load time: at 3G speeds (~1.5 Mbps), each MB adds ~5 seconds. Compression reduces transfer size but not memory usage — the browser must decompress before rendering.

Example

```
File size reference:

  1 KB  = 1,024 bytes      ≈ a short paragraph of text
  1 MB  = 1,048,576 bytes   ≈ a 1-minute MP3 at 128 kbps
  1 GB  = 1,073,741,824 bytes ≈ 1 hour of HD video

  Web delivery targets:
  HTML page:  < 100 KB    Hero image: < 200 KB
  JavaScript: < 200 KB    Total page: < 2 MB
```

Related Terms

API Archive Batch Processing Buffer Buffering Cache Checksum Verification Chunking