Baseline is the fastest disk scanning app on Mac OS X
Baseline 0.2.5 is out. The main changes are some tweaks by Fernando Lins to the toolbar icons, to make them stand our more against the Leopard toolbar.
Under the hood, all of the strings in Baseline are now fully localizable, so localized versions should be available soon. If you’re interested in providing a translation for Baseline, get in touch.
We’ve already spotted one minor glitch in 0.2.5 – it says “remaining” instead of “elapsed” in the Volume status message, but we’ll get that fixed soon.
In the meantime, we’ve been doing some speed comparisons between Baseline and other Disk sizing/scanning application on Mac OS X.
The table below shows the results of our tests.
| Application | Time | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline (0.2.5) | 1 minute 26 seconds | 103MB/467MB |
| WhatSize (10.3.92) | 1 minute 32 seconds | 75MB/462MB |
| Grand Perspective (0.99) | 1 minute 37 seconds | 74MB/426MB |
| OmniDiskSweeper (1.5.2) | 2 minutes 31 seconds | 239MB/621MB |
| Disk Inventory X (1.0) | 3 minutes 40 seconds | 493MB/923MB |
All of tests were performed on a BlackBook 2Ghz Intel Core Duo running Mac OS X 10.4.10, with 1.25GB of RAM. The test application was frontmost, and the only application running, apart from the Finder and Terminal. The application was restarted in between each scan. The volume being scanned was a 54.41GB partition with 47.21GB of space in use.
All times were the averages of four runs, except for Disk Inventory X, where we got bored after the first run. The memory figures are for Real and Virtual memory consumption for each application, once a scan of the volume was complete (these figures were taken from single runs).
The first thing to notice is that Baseline is the fastest! Yay!
Not by much – WhatSize and Grand Perspective are pretty close behind. In fact WhatSize clocked the fastest single scan time of all the apps, at 1 minute 18 seconds, although the rest of its times were 1 minute 30 seconds or greater – I suspect that all three apps are utilising the exact same Apple API call, so the only differences will be in whatever book-keeping they’re doing as they go along.
OmniDiskSweeper was a big surprise here, taking a minute longer than the pack leaders. As for Disk Inventory X, we gave up after the first scan.
The memory figures are also pretty interesting. All of the apps essentially load the entire directory tree for the volume into memory, which explains why the figures are quite high.
WhatSize and Grand Perspective are the leanest, and have almost identical memory usage. Baseline comes third, but in this case, Baseline also had a baseline loaded into memory, which accounts for the extra.
OmniDiskSweeper is pretty profligate in the memory stakes. There’s room for two or three copies of the directory tree in there. Disk Inventory X is even more greedy, consuming six times as much memory as the leanest apps.
There’s still a *tiny* bit of scope for optimising Baseline’s scanning, and memory, but not that much.
We’ll test on a bigger disk next time (and on Leopard, of course), to try and heighten the differences between the applications.
Of course, as well as being the fastest, and one of the leanest disk sizing apps, uniquely, Baseline can show you exactly what’s changed on your disk as well.