Question Thuosands of SerializeFile entries using a lot of memory

Can someone explain what these SerializeFile entries are?

I've been profiling the memory on Android to see how we're doing now that we're using Addressables. We sit at around 273 MB memory in Other/SerializedFile? What? Why?

We only use a handful of AssetBundles at this point, and I've understood that each AssetBundle should take up a bit of memory here, as they have some sort of buffer allocated. But I have over 10000 (ten thousand) assets with only their GUID listed. The entries are reported to use ~20 KB each. I've looked at a sample of those assets to see what they are - and they are ScriptableObject assets that, according to the content build report take only a few hundred bytes each. What is all that overhead?



Unity 2020.3.5f2
Addressables 1.18.11
Built on a Windows machine targeting Android.

 

I found that there were a bunch of assets in Resources folders that indirectly referenced those assets that are listed by GUID in the original picture above. When I cut those assets out of the Resources folders the SerializeFile memory went from 273 MB down to around 8 MB. That's a massive reduction. I'd appreciate if some Unity dev could elaborate on the internals of it all.