Observatory

Observatory was made out of a desire for a high quality and modern disk usage analysis tool that can be used on all the most popular desktop operating systems. Other alternatives out there are either old, ugly, confusing, platform specific, or some combination of all of these.

Observatory checks all the boxes that no one else does.

• Pretty ✔
• Modern ✔
• Cross platform ✔
• Fast ✔ (sort of)
• Memory efficient ✔ (sort of)

The last two are both things that are kind of work-in-progress. The current scanning implementation is in TypeScript, which comes with some performance and memory usage concerns. On a reasonably powerful laptop it's fine, but on some lower end machines it may cause issues.

Build

To build Observatory, you'll first need to install the latest versions of Node and Yarn.

Install dependencies:

yarn

To run in development:

yarn dev

Build an installer:

yarn forge

Performance

• DaisyDisk: 13.20s
• Observatory: 77.896s

DaisyDisk will probably always be faster since it can optimize specifically for macOS and runs directly on hardware instead of inside of V8. I'm currently attempting to rewrite the disk analysis in Rust, which could potentially see a huge improvement in performance, but that's yet to be proven.

Goals

Full scan should take less than 20 seconds on a recent/decent MacBook Pro. It currently takes much longer.