Mac system bloat, dyld duplicates, and Adobe

daveswallace wrote:

Omni disk's output is also nonsensical

That is going to be true for most 3rd party disk management tools. The modern macOS file system is radically different than what it was years ago. At best, your 3rd party disk tools will just confuse you. At worst, they will irreparably damage your hard drive.

First all, if you want to look at how much free hard drive space you have, there is only one place to look - Disk Utility. Ignore anything else, especially anything in the Finder.

(Technically speaking, there are other places to look using the Terminal, but I'm not going to get into that here.)

You have to be extremely careful with terminology. I mentioned "free hard drive space" above. In many places, you will see storage referenced as "available". This has absolutely nothing to do with "free" storage.

On macOS, storage is considered to be an extension of memory. Free storage is considered wasted storage. The operating system will fill up all available memory and all available storage until it runs out of things to fill it with. If you need more memory and/or more storage, it will make it available. But to be clear, it is the operating system that decides this, not you. You are allowed to ask, politely. If you start making demands of the system, it will give you what you ask, but it will simply lie to you about it.

So what do you do? Let's review...

I have a 250 GB hard drive on a 2018 Macbook pro running Mac OS Monterey 12.1. My user folder is 135 GB including a User Library of 18 GB. According to "get info," the System folder is 30 GB and the Library folder next to it is 17 GB. According to system information, Mac OS is 16 GB and System Files are 60 GB.

The only significant value there is your home user folder. Everything else should be about the same on all other computers. Here are the values from my computer:

System: 24 GB

Applications: 39 GB

Unknown: 30 GB

Other: 8 GB

Total: 101 GB

Add your user folder of 135 GB and you get a total of 236 GB, which is almost exactly the size of your disk. You said you have a 250 GB hard drive, so that means you should have about 14 GB free space.

Your values for Applications, Unknown, and possibly Other could vary, but not by much. Essentially the OS is going to take about 100 GB. Is that what you consider bloat? 😄 For good or bad, that's the way it is.

What you can do:

• Go through your 135 GB and free up as much as you can
• Get an external hard drive for the rest
• Turn on iCloud Drive with Documents & Desktop. Most people aren't going to be able to regularly make use of 135 GB of data, so this is a good solution.

What you should not do:

• Anything you have tried so far.
• You can't make any changes to the operating system. If you do succeed in making any changes, you will likely be reinstalling said operating system shortly thereafter.
• You can't make many changes to apps either. They simply don't take up much storage.
• You can't make any permanent changes to "other" files either. You can delete local snapshots, use some scam "clean up" tool to delete your cache files and slow your computer down. But the operating system will repair itself and take back all that storage eventually.

I don't know what you mean by "instantly slamming my computer into scratch disk errors". If you are really getting disk errors, that is a serious, serious hardware failure. Back up your compter and take it in to Apple for hardware diagnostics and repair while it is (hopefully) still under warranty. If you meant something else, other than actual "disk errors", then please clarify. If you simply mean that Photoshop wants to use virtual memory and your disk is out of free storage, well, then you have to free up some storage then don't you. It sounds like you are completely out. 250 GB is really a small amount of storage these days. If you are fairly light user, then 500 GB will suffice. But don't attempt any kind of professional work on a modern Mac with less than 1 TB of storage.

The files that you have control over are located in the Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, My Albums, Pictures, Public and Sites folders.  You can use either of these two free apps, GrandPerspective  or OmniDiscSweeper, to find the largest files on your drive so you can determine if they can be deleted or moved to an external HD for storage.  

Note: you can empty the Downloads folder after the apps and/or updates that were downloaded have been installed or applied.  Many users have found a couple of Gigabytes of files in their Downloads folder which are no longer needed. 

Booting into Safe Mode according to How to use safe mode on your Mac will clear out a lot of system and application temporary cache and swap files.

You can't delete any files from the System folder. It resides on a read only partition.

Before you attempt to delete those files, read this, from someone much more knowledgeable than me. And even if you don't read all of it, read the last sentence:

If you delete the shared cache files in /System/Library/dyld/, I'm afraid your system won't be able to boot or run.

The system/library/dyld folder is 12.5 GB of the library and appears to show redundant, duplicated files (see attached).

Appearance doesn't imply truth.

I see the same in my "started from scratch" MBP. The folder is only 5GB, though.

daveswallace wrote:

The concern here is that the system OS is failing to make this additional space available when needed

I haven't heard of this "failing" per se. It does it on its own schedule, according to its own needs. When you are this low on free space, you typically need to wait until you start getting error messages from apps. Some time afterwards, the background tasks will kick in and evict some of that purgeable storage. I am basing this on what I've seen multiple people report here in the forums. Personally, I've never let my system get under 50 GB free, so I've never experienced it.

or creating redundant dyld files (hence the .1 .2 .3 iterations which I haven't seen in other's snapshots.)

Those aren't dyld files. They are cache files. Anything that isn't on the "Data" drive should be considered private, Apple proprietary data structures. Apple even has some portions, called "data vaults", that you can't see at all. But all of it is strictly Apple's business. The fact that the parent folder says "dyld" doesn't necessarily mean anything. You cannot make any assumptions about this structures not behaving correctly. You simply don't know. I don't know either. Nobody outside of Apple, and virtually no on inside Apple, knows how all this works.

So there are two outstanding issues here related to possible system errors:

There are no system errors here.

Yes, this is photoshop dumping massive amounts of files for future use.

Then that sounds like a problem for Photoshop. Those big 3rd party apps typically run 2-3 years behind Apple development. Apple changes things on a regular basis and they struggle to keep up. It is all part of the plan, of course. People always update their computers to the latest and "greatest". Then they have to buy the latest version of any 3rd party apps to make sure they keep working. The whole industry is now dependent on yearly updates breaking everything and generating new sales. The only option is not to play - which few people do.

However, Mac released a 2018 15" pro model with 250 GB of storage hardwired in, so it's what I have to work with.

There are many compatible Thunderbolt 3 drives available. Some of them use high-speed M.2 SSDs. Combined with a fast, true Thunderbolt bus, such a drive would be as fast as your internal drive. Unfortunately, when you buy a Mac, you either have to buy it with all of the RAM or storage that you will ever need, or use things like external drives and/or iCloud later on.

I did enable iCloud a few days ago, but this has only made the situation more suspicious and look like apple fuckery. Other than activating iCloud to handle photos (not yet reduced in size), the only other difference was forcing my computer to stay up all night so maybe it ran some scripts?

As I mentioned above, there is no process that will delete files without necessity. You have 25 GB free. That isn't much, but it is 25 GB free. You have to get to zero bytes free, then the operating system will start working and give you more. But regardless, you don't have much free storage, you there will be no end to this fill up, free up, fill up dance until you make more free space available. The operating system is working as designed.

Finder suddenly decided that the 60 GB of system files which has been growing since I first got the computer, was free space,

Again, as I mentioned above, ignore anything other that Disk Utility. You can run certain Terminal commands to get free storage. You most definitely don't want to look at that Apple > About this Mac > Storage display. That is the worst of the worst. Do not believe anything that display tells you.

although disk utility still shows them:

And at this point, I'm not sure what you are talking about anymore. What is "them". This is Disk Utility. It shows you have 25 GB of free space. That's not under dispute. You said your home folder has 135 GB. That's where you need to cut about 80 GB.

GrandPerspective now shows them too, as 83 GB of "misc used space (in grey).

Please don't use these 3rd party tools. They don't understand modern Apple file systems. It is impossible to see how storage is being used on a file-by-file basis. This is why Apple's own Apple > About this Mac > Storage display is so often wrong. You can only see free space by looking at the disk level.

You have to delete some of those 135 GB in your home folder. There is no other option. If you have tools like Photoshop that have extensive storage needs, you will need to see if you can configure them to use external storage as scratch space.

daveswallace wrote:

Am I getting it?

That's hard to say. Nobody really "gets" it because it is all proprietary Apple information. Nobody knows how it works. Everything you read here is just a bunch of educated guesses.

I'm pretty sure that your storage use is not going to be exponentially related to any app's behaviour. The primary culprits are things like Time Machine local snapshots, system databases, temporary files, cache files, and log files. All of these can be deleted to make more room. The operating system will do that itself when it runs out. But it has to run out first. And once that happens, it will just start rebuilding all of that for next time. If you have a fast, modern SSD, this all happens instantaneously and you probably never notice it. If you have an older, mechanical hard drive, your computer will stop dead in its tracks when this happens.

When combined with another proprietary storage system like Adobe's, who knows what is happening. All of this is deeply intertwined with the virtual memory system too. Virtual memory is quite hilarious when you find out how it really works. It is basically just the operating system and apps lying to each other about their memory usage. And it isn't even "lying" in the metaphoric sense. This is real, malicious falsehoods. Operating systems want to keep RAM for themselves and to service the entire system, at the expense of app performance. Individual apps want the highest performance so they will ask for more RAM than they really need. Sophisticated apps, like, ahem, Adobe, will even try to allocate RAM with specific patterns because they know how the VM is lying to them, so they try to beat the VM at its own game. But these apps are so popular that operating system developers know about their tricks and develop countermeasures. Yes. This is the way it really works. Crazy.

This is what I'm referring to by Control (right) - clicking on the System folder:

If you select the system folder and bring up the Info pane for it, Control (right) - click, what side does it indicate?