In the Maclab today (er… yesterday), my boss was concerned with the virtual memory usage on his computer, as the machine was reporting some mythically high amount (like 36GB), so a few of us checked it out on one of the machines that I had just setup. We discovered that the virtual memory usage was suspiciously close the amount of space used on the disk, which was also 36GB. Not trusting the Apple system monitor utility, I fired up top to see what was up. It wasn’t quite as high as what system monitor was reporting, but it was still around 7GB. According to top, bash had something like 500MB to it. Something was wrong, but I often get that feeling with memory usage reporting, so it might have been something else.

My boss did, however, notice the size of our base install (we use the software radmind to update our machines, so there is a consistent base for what a machine should have on it). 36GB is high for a base install, so this concern is fair, but Leopard is no small operating system. My concept of how bloated a system can has been defined by Leopard, so 36GB seemed on the right scale to me. We first checked out the /Applications folder, since most of what is in there is our own doing. We have some hefty software packages installed like Mathematica, some OSS FPSes I installed, and a SheepShaver (a mac classic emulator; the folder includes the disk images for it!), so there was definitely some sizely stuff to justify the 12GB in the folder. What came as a real surprise though was all of the iBarelyFunction HD applications installed:

$ du -sh i*
94M    iCal.app
115M    iChat.app
73M    iDVD.app
81M    iMovie HD.app
552M    iPhoto.app
35M    iSync.app
131M    iTunes.app
322M    iWeb.app
2.0G    iWork ‘06

For a point of reference, Mathematica is 490MB total. The iWork (hahaha) folder has Pages and Keynote in it, both of which have heavy numbers of templates in them. The same story goes for iPhoto and iWeb. There is just tons and tons of stuff in each of these folders. In iPhoto, templates account for 377MB of its 552MB size; the rest is just Apple’s standard practice. For reference, Microsoft, King Vista of bloat, managed to only squeeze 536MB into the 2004 Office package.

Of course, that was just the Applications folder, if you want to find bulk central, look no farther than /Library, which comes to around 12GB on our systems. I have been learning a fair bit more about the design of Mac OS X design recently, and there are some definite great designs in it, but sometimes I am just amazed it manages to run.