Better lots of small objects or few huge ones?

[Aethereal]

Today, trying to simplify the models in my scene, I joined in blender the several objects composing the wings into only three obj (I joined those using the same materials).
The new export was even slightly larger than the old one (new is about 128 MB), despite the fact that the number of vertices and faces should be the same and there are at least 20+ mesh and models declaration less.
I then realized that the new meshes have really huge amounts of verts, and that now tri declarations use more digits (the drawback of text files).
That triggered a new question: I don't know the details of the internal array Indigo use to store mesh data, so I wonder (see the post title): better to have lots of objects and keep them as simple as possible, or go for less but very complex ones?

[Aethereal]

Looks like this answers my question...



I've now resolved to use a lesser detailed mesh for the wings (that are anyway away and, with the final lightning, partly in shadow)

So I did a "remove doubles" in blender, followed a poly reduction script and re-exported them.
The original Wings.xml was 128.371KB, this ligter one is 48.857 KB, but objects names, positions and materials are the same, so I can easily switch back to the original high-detailed mesh changing the name of the include file

I would like to point out that when the mesh were subdivided into several smaller meshes, Indigo worked fine (but it was a mess for me to manage so many models)