The incredible shrinking and growing HD

towel

I've been steadily running down the free space on my iBook's 9GB boot partition, down to 700MB this morning, for no reason I could see. But after a little funny business with applications quitting unexpectedly, I did a permissions repair, fsck, and a pair a reboots. And now I have 1.5GB free space. Is that 800MB I got back all scratch disk? I do tend to keep a bunch of Apps active - today it's Mail, Safari, several mysql Terminal windows, Excel, BBEdit, TextEdit, and Keynote; with multiple windows open in most of them. Maybe I really need to bump my RAM from 384MB to 640.



OSX seems to prefer that you keep all your files on the boot partition (in your home directory), but I feel like I should keep as much space as possible free on that drive. Are near-1GB swings in free space like that typical? Should I be rebooting regularly to clear the scratch (once a month whether it needs it or not ) or trying to keep like 20% of the boot volume free?

chucker

You can move your home directory somewhere else.

thuh freak

well, personally i hate rebooting, and avoid it like the plague. also, i'm confident in macosx's ability to properly handle the vm system, and to grow/shrink as necessary. as for the huge swing in your hd, i'm kind of stumped. the only thing i can think of is the /tmp directory. i'm pretty sure on startup it gets emptied, so you may want to hit that time machine and see if you had any huge files in there (or if you lose a lot of space for no apparent reason, then check there as well). i can't think of what might be clogging it up, but i'm pretty sure it tidys itself on reboot.



if you're concerned about memory, you should grab a memory monitor (like menumeters), and see how your ram is doing. if its constantly below whatever amount you feel comfortable with, you may want to try changing your computer habits, or getting more ram. with the meter, you can see which programs are the most hungry, and quit them more frequently. but honestly, i doubt you're dipping into 800M of vm.

towel

Quote:

Originally posted by Chucker

You can move your home directory somewhere else.

I was wondering about that. If you do try to move it, say to a different partition, how do you tell the OS that it's still ~/ ? Then, if you can map ~/ to /Volumes/otherpartition, what happens to /Users/myusername ? Will applications know to look in the right place for settings and prefs? I guess I'm wondering how many applications know to look for ~/ and not /Users/activeuser. Does that make any sense?

jtmac

I started having similar swings in available disk space after I switched to Safari. As far as I can figure, the Safari cache grows pretty quickly.



One of the great things about OS X is that I never reboot; I put by iBook to sleep when I'm not using it, and it NEVER crashes. But the occasional reboot does seem to clean things up.



So my experience is to reset the Safari cache, and reboot occasionally. I also use

MacJanitor for general housekeeping.

ibrowse

Quote:

Originally posted by Towel

I was wondering about that. If you do try to move it, say to a different partition, how do you tell the OS that it's still ~/ ? Then, if you can map ~/ to /Volumes/otherpartition, what happens to /Users/myusername ? Will applications know to look in the right place for settings and prefs? I guess I'm wondering how many applications know to look for ~/ and not /Users/activeuser. Does that make any sense?

For any applications that will need to look there still, you can put a symbolic link there to the new location, it's better than an alias, but is used for the same thing. thuh Freak can tell you how to do it in the terminal I believe, but for the sake of clicking buttons instead of typing, you can make one with the application Cocktail.

g3joel

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/homedir.html