Why the Finder sucks, vol. 299,792,458

This evening I decided to make a compressed backup of my Virtual PC List folder, which contains my 2.35 GB main Virtual PC image. I immediately thought of two ways to complete this task.

1. Use the Finder to create an archive of the Virtual PC List folder. When I tried this, it immediately tried to allocate many gigabytes of memory, which sent even my mighty dual G5 with 2 GB of RAM into a thrashing spiral. When the beachball went away, the Finder thought it was compressing 4.71 GB of data. This is when I hit Cancel.

2. Open Disk Utility, select New Disk Image from Folder, and create a compressed disk image. Disk Utility calmly shrunk my data down to 1 GB while never using more than 60 MB of memory.