JeremyP's Blog

Disk space

I was down to 10 Gigabytes on my Macintosh today, so I thought I'd see if I could find some space from somewhere. As it's a Unix box, there is an easy way to find out what is using all the space and that is the du command. You change directory to the root and do a du -ks as shown below. Note that the below example hasn't completed traversing the file system - Users and System are missing and some other minor stuff.

jeremyp@titania:/$ sudo du -ks *

Password:

4515532 Applications

440264  Applications (Mac OS 9)

0       Cleanup At Startup

8       CyberViewX Installer Log File

4       Desktop (Mac OS 9)

900     Desktop DB

1944    Desktop DF

24      Desktop Folder

957128  Developer

47796   Documents

31260   IBM

1649684 Library

16      MAU 1.1.1 Update Log

60      Macintosh HD

7       Network

8       Office X 10.1.2 Update Log

4       Office X 10.1.3 Update Log

8       Office X 10.1.4 Update Log

4       Office X 10.1.5 Update Log

8       Previous Systems

188     Requirements checklist.doc

0       Shutdown Check

and then you repeat for the biggest directories until you find some large useless files. Using this method I found a folder called "Previous Systems" which I had totally forgotten about. When you reinstall the OS the old one is saved in a special folder under this directory. I had two "previous systems", one from an occasion when I accidentally made my OS non bootable and one from the upgrade to 10.3. Deleting both of these gave me 7 Gigabytes back.

Memory

I've been a bit concerned recently about the amount of memory the Mac is using. I have 512 Megabytes and quite often I'm close to the limit. This doesn't usually cause problems, just swapping to disk which obviously slows stuff down.

Last night I was right on the limit even though I didn't have more than my normal quota of applications open. I was wondering if something I run regularly had a memory leak, so I closed everything and it made no difference. Hmmmm... it was late, so I didn't bother with a reboot.

This morning, I had the idea of moving the dock to the side of the screen. My Mac has a widescreen, so I thought it'd be better use of screen real estate. Soon after moving the dock to the side, the memory usage fell to less than 250 Megabytes. Even now, with Safari running, my memory is still more than half empty. Does the dock grab loads of RAM? I'll have to monitor it and find out.