system folders that seem quite large,?

[robins2001]

Hello all,

After sifting though my system files I’ve notices a lot of folders that take up quite a lot of space and I’m not even sure if there are necessary…

A few of the folders are:

Username/library/caches, which is 80mb
Username/library/preferences, which is 50mb
Username/library/application support, which is 30mb
Root/library/printers, which is 650mb (I only own 1 printer which is an Epson)

Is any of this stuff ok to remove? The printers is a big one, what’s this in aide of?

I want to try and keep this mac running tip top and I’ve noticed a slight decrease in performance over the months..

Thanks a lot

Ben

 

[Vector]

THose don't really seem to be very large to me. My folder sizes are

Cache - 127mb
Preferences - 15mb
App support - 53mb
My Printers folder in the root library is 797mb, and this can be deleted. OSX installs every driver it has unless you tell it not to. You can safely delete the printers that you do not need.

I would not remove any application support files unless you no longer have the program. If you have any adobe program, that is probably why the folder is so big. My root application support folder is 345mb.

With the cache and preference folders, i would suggest the same thing. Only delete them if you no longer have the program that the preference files or caches go with. You might also want to go through the cache file and see if there are any files that are especially large.

 

[JFreak]

system performance gradually decreases because you likely have not partitioned your hard drive properly. you know, that is the biggest bottleneck of current computer system, and the only significant moving part. by the laws of physics, hard drives perform better closer to the disc edge and worse closer to center, and having only one partition leads to disk having to seek "full stroke" more than necessary.

now if you would have a dedicated system partition of 15GB as a first partition of the drive, you would force the system to keep all system files in that fastest area of you hard drive. you would also effectively cut seek times to half. not doing this is actually kind of stupid, but it also requires a bit of knowledge how to do it.

the trick is to move the /Users folder to different partition and leave the system files alone. if almost nothing ever writes to system partition, the performance will stay great all the time. this user folder can be moved to another partition by simply modifying /etc/fstab file.

you cannot believe how fast a system can be if you haven't tried to partition your drive properly. it's a huge boost and worth the hassle.

 

[LeeTom]

Slightly unrelated to the first post, but... I just noticed that my /Library directory was taking up 14GB of space. I thought that was a little weird, and sure enough in Logs/Console/username/ my console.log.0 file was 11GB!!! I didn't check it out thoroughly, but there was some message from some program that made the same line over and over again. I deleted it and took back those 11GB.

Lee Tom

 

[Vector]

That is strange, my console folder only takes up a few hundred kb.

 

[robins2001]

system performance gradually decreases because you likely have not partitioned your hard drive properly. you know, that is the biggest bottleneck of current computer system, and the only significant moving part. by the laws of physics, hard drives perform better closer to the disc edge and worse closer to center, and having only one partition leads to disk having to seek "full stroke" more than necessary.

now if you would have a dedicated system partition of 15GB as a first partition of the drive, you would force the system to keep all system files in that fastest area of you hard drive. you would also effectively cut seek times to half. not doing this is actually kind of stupid, but it also requires a bit of knowledge how to do it.

the trick is to move the /Users folder to different partition and leave the system files alone. if almost nothing ever writes to system partition, the performance will stay great all the time. this user folder can be moved to another partition by simply modifying /etc/fstab file.

you cannot believe how fast a system can be if you haven't tried to partition your drive properly. it's a huge boost and worth the hassle.

so whats the best way to partition? would it be toback everything up, completly format the drive and start again? or can i do this by booting into disk utility?

 

[Vector]

In order to create partitions, you have to backup everything and the do a clean reinstall using the osx disks. When you put the disks in, it will give you the option in the installation guide or you can use the disk utility that is in the menu.

 

[LeeTom]

That is strange, my console folder only takes up a few hundred kb.

Yeah, i think it was some freeware program i got that was dumping waaaay too much info.

Lee Tom

 

[wrldwzrd89]

I have a method for repartitioning my hard disk that involves much less hassle. Here's how it works:
1. Use a cloning program such as Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your main hard drive to an external hard drive, making sure that the clone is bootable.
2. Boot from the clone.
3. Open Disk Utility and repartition your main hard drive.
4. Use the cloning program again to clone the clone that you're booted from back to the main hard drive (using whichever partition you've decided to use for this purpose).
5. Boot from the main hard drive with the files you just copied on it.
6. Make any further tweaks, like the /etc/fstab modification JFreak mentioned.

You're done!