details of OSX system footprint?

kfancy · #1 July 24th, 2004, 03:40 AM

i'm doing a bit of research on mac osx and its 100's of megabytes of diskspace that it takes up. i'm curious about the ratio of actual OS code vs. memory taken up for things like graphics, low-level animations, anything that we SEE versus what happens behind the scenes.

anybody just happen to know that, or know a way or place where i can find out such information?

thanks ahead of time \\ kfancy

scruffy · #2 July 25th, 2004, 02:35 PM

You mean disk space, as opposed to RAM, right?

A good way of doing this is just to open /System and /Library in list view, sort by size, and check the prefs to make is calculate all sizes. Then you can expand folders until you get down to levels that start making sense - printer drivers take up so much space, screen savers so much...

kfancy · #3 July 26th, 2004, 01:37 AM

yes, diskspace.
looking to see how much space the visual components of the OS take up vs. just OS coding... i.e. how much space is dedicated to window viewing, icon animations, system icons, etc.

i've tried looking through the sys libraries but they're not really specific.

is there another way to look through some folders via the UNIX interface? i know how to use the UNIX shell, but not really sure where to look.

\\ kfancy

lurk · #4 July 26th, 2004, 09:36 AM

Your question is still a little under specified. For instance I assume you are interested in the little poof cloud that gets drawn when you drag something off the dock, but what about the code to animate that?

Here is a little script that will find all the tiff files in the system directory and add up their sizes.

Code:

find /System -name "*.tiff" -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l | awk '{sum += $5;} END{ print sum;}'

On my machine running that script yields 11,192,975 so there are 11 MB of tiff files. While the whole directory rooted at /System is 1,695 MB so by this crude test 0.6% of the space in /System is taken up by graphics files.

There are a couple of things hidden in resource forks and the like that I missed above but not much.

Hope that helps,
-Eric

DeltaMac · #5 July 26th, 2004, 10:36 AM

Won't memory usage (and disk space) be hard to quantify (except for actual file space)? Memory and disk usage are both dynamic, so you can check now, and a few seconds later, the results may be substantially different.

ElDiabloConCaca · #6 July 26th, 2004, 11:03 AM

I think what he wants to know is, say, comparing OS X to Darwin -- Darwin is the heart and soul of OS X and has the same basic functionality as OS X minus the GUI.

A good way to compare the two is to install Darwin on one hard drive and OS X on another, then compare the disk usage of each.

For memory operations and processor taxing due to the GUI, run "top" on both machines and see how much processes like "WindowServer" take up on the OS X box versus Darwin (since Darwin doesn't have WindowServer).

scruffy · #7 July 26th, 2004, 12:52 PM

What about things that are real system components, but at the same time eye-candy / frivolous stuff?

$ du -s /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickTime.framework/
5.2M /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickTime.framework/
$ du -s /System/Library/Frameworks/ForceFeedback.framework/
576K /System/Library/Frameworks/ForceFeedback.framework/

And so on...

ElDiabloConCaca · #8 July 26th, 2004, 03:03 PM

I would assume that only operational code is compiled in the framework files, and the GUI elements would be defined only in the .nib files of the actual application, so you could compare application sizes on Darwin vs. OS X and see what the difference is.

...and compare the framework files as well, to see if they differ in size...