How big is a mouse jiggler? Installer sizes measured
Stayaway's Windows installer is 4.0 MB, LazyWork's 69.9 MB and IdleBuster's 105.8 MB. The exact bytes, where each was measured, and why they differ.
By the Stayaway team3 min read
Stayaway's Windows installer is 4.0 MB. LazyWork's newest is 69.9 MB and IdleBuster's is 105.8 MB, about 17 and 26 times larger. Here are the exact numbers, where each one comes from, and what the difference does and doesn't tell you.
The measurements
| App | Version | Windows installer | Built with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stayaway | 0.1.4 | 4,026,065 bytes (4.0 MB) | Tauri: Rust, and the WebView2 engine Windows already has |
| LazyWork | 3.1 (beta) | 69,944,401 bytes (69.9 MB) | Python, packaged with PyInstaller, with the Qt toolkit |
| LazyWork | 3.0 (stable) | 79,830,582 bytes (79.8 MB) | Python, packaged with PyInstaller, with the Qt toolkit |
| IdleBuster | 2.0.0 | 105,818,108 bytes (105.8 MB) | Electron: its own copy of Chromium and Node.js |
Megabytes here are decimal: 1 MB is 1,000,000 bytes. Windows File Explorer counts in units of 1,048,576 bytes, so it shows the same files about 5% smaller: 3.8, 66.7, 76.1 and 100.9 MB.
How each was measured
- Stayaway: the size of the installer attached to the 0.1.4 release, published 5 October 2026. It is the same file the download page links.
- LazyWork: both builds were downloaded from LazyWork's download page on 14 September 2026 to measure and inspect them. They were never installed or run. On 7 October 2026 that page still listed 3.1 (beta) as the newest Windows build and 3.0 as the stable one.
- IdleBuster: read on 14 September 2026 from the file details of the installer that IdleBuster's download page links, which is hosted on Google Drive, without downloading it. Checked again on 7 October 2026: the same file,
IdleBuster-Setup-2.0.0.exe, at the same size.
Why they differ
The gap comes from how each app is built, not from how much each one does.
- Electron (IdleBuster) ships a complete copy of the Chromium browser engine and the Node.js runtime inside every app. That accounts for most of the 105.8 MB before any of IdleBuster's own code.
- PyInstaller (LazyWork) bundles a Python interpreter together with the libraries the app uses, here including Qt, a large toolkit for drawing windows and controls.
- Tauri (Stayaway) draws its window with WebView2, the web engine Windows already includes, so the installer carries little more than the app itself. Windows 11 includes WebView2 and most Windows 10 PCs already have it. If a PC doesn't, Stayaway's installer downloads it from Microsoft first, and that one-time download isn't counted above.
What the size does and doesn't tell you
The size tells you how much you download and how long that takes on a slow connection.
It doesn't tell you how much memory or processor time an app uses while it runs, or how well it does its job. We haven't measured those, so we make no claim about them here. For what each app actually does, see the sourced comparison of LazyWork, IdleBuster and Stayaway.
Versions change, and so do sizes. Each figure above is tied to its version and the date it was measured, and we'll measure again when new versions come out.
Check the file you have
Stayaway publishes the SHA-256 of every installer on the download page, so you can confirm the file on your computer is exactly the one measured here.