Why pretrained models (vgg19) take 550Mb?

vgg19-dcbb9e9d.pth from torchvision.models takes 0.5Gb. Why so many? Is it possible to reduce file size in the case of only evaluation?

The model is just really big or rather it has a lot of parameters.
You can find more information about the model here.

I’m not sure how much you can save by zipping it, but you could try that.