All of these suck. Use nested bar graphs like TreeSize and it’s instantly obvious what your biggest hitter is for any particular nesting level.
In lieu of that, a flame graph is tolerable. The polar coordinate one is very pretty garbage. EDIT: Use it when you want to mislead people with a flashy graph.
Flamegraphs are a really lovely tool for visualizing trees. Slightly related anecdote:
A while ago I was experimenting with interactive exploration of (huge) Monte Carlo Tree Search trees. Inspired by file system visualization tools, my first attempts were also tree maps and sunburst graphs, but I ran into the same problems as in the article.
I tried flamegraphs next with the following setup:
- The number of visits in each node maps to the width and order of each bar (i.e., the most visited node was first and was the largest)
- The expected value maps to the color of each bar.
And then it was a perfect fit: it's easy to see what's going on in each branch at the first levels, and the deeper levels can be explored through drilling down.
For profiling I like the dual representation of treemap and tree of https://kcachegrind.github.io/html/Home.html a lot. Addresses the criticized points of treemaps of the post (see percentage and estimate areas of sub-trees) better than the examples chosen there.
Oh this is beautiful and I'm so glad it's been reposted because I missed it the first time.
Flamegraphs seem so much more interpretable and informative than the other plots there, at least to me personally. And I never would have thought to use them for this, because usually when I need to clean out disks or take care of storage it's time sensitive and I want to spend the minimum time figuring things out, and poor viz is enough to accomplish the goal.
An ongoing falmegraph of disk usage over time would be super helpful for many systems I'm working with right now.
For Windows there is SpaceSniffer. I highly recommend
Windows equivalent: WizTree[1].
WizTree is super great. Strong recommend.