Tiger Size

[rAph]

I just bought my first Mac...the MacBook Pro. I have it dual booted (boot camp) with Windows, but I think OSX is great. However, I'm surprised at how much space is already taken up on my Macintosh HD. I've had the computer for a few days, and already 30GB are taken up! I have Parallels installed, and the disk image is 10GB. So that leaves 20GB taken up by OSX. The only other "big" thing I've installed is Office (which is around 450mb). I haven't transfered any movies, pictures or music. So where has all this space dissapeared to? Someone please help! Thanks...

PS. I ran Monolingual and removed all the extra language files. That saved 2GB. So what else is eating up 18GB of data?

[rAph]

I just noticed that the VM size is 6GB right after a restart! That would explain why so much HD space is already used up. 10GB for OSX installation with all the programs it comes with (iLife etc...I guess that's acceptable) and probably 10GB or so for a page file after a few hours of uptime. Is this normal? On my XP desktop (w/ same amount of RAM...2GB) the page file never goes over 200MB. The VM Size in OSX seems ludicrous. Is there anything I can do about this? What an earth does OSX need 6-10GB of memory for? I thought Unix/OSX were supposed to be more resource efficient than Windows? What gives?

-Raph "a very puzzled Windows user"

[Lt Major Burns]

mac uses a lot of virtual memory, because it does it so well. they advise that 10-15% of the startup disk be left free for the system to use.

my uptime is about 15 days i reckon at the moment, my VM stands at about 13gb. this is acceptable, i think, being as i have Safari, Firefox, Mail, Limewire, iTunes, Adium, iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, Quicktime, Image Capture, Word, After Effects, Image Ready, Photoshop, Illustrator, Fetch FTP, Font Book, Flash 8, Flash Player, Dreamweaver, Preview, Amadeus, Text Edit, Activity Monitor, Handbrake, Disk Utility, CoverFlow, FreePops, and EarthDesk all running currently at the moment (!), and it's been this way for days.

try that with Windows' memory management...!

Just to explain, i'm currently working on two briefs, one being some motion graphics intros for a tv program, the other being the website in my signature, hence the amount of apps open, but the system is fine.

[nixgeek]

Considering Burns' scenario, are you sure you don't have a bunch of apps open rAph? Remember that in OS X closing the app from the window doesn't quit out of the application. You have to either go to File-->Quit or use the Command-Q keyboard shortcut to quit out. (You'll note if the app is open if it's on the dock with a black triangle underneath. Closed apps won't have that triangle.)

As for the reasons for this quitting-app difference, you can search the forums for the reasons why that is. It's been talked up ad nauseum.

[rAph]

Well the 6GB VM size is right after a restart, with no apps/windows open/opened.

I went to /private/var/vm and the swapfile0 is only 64MB big. Is this the swap file Activity Monitor claims is 6GB big?