Flutterby™! : Turn off Dashboard 2007-11-05 02:15:28.530511+00

Turn off Dashboard

2007-11-05 02:15:28.530511+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

I just ran top to see if I could figure out why this Mac tower (with, I'll admit, a strong point, the gorgeous Apple cinema display) was such a dog when compiling, and part of that lead to How to disable (and enable) Dashboard. ~~If 30% of your CPU (and probably some amount of I/O) isn't worth having something idling that basically has a couple of web pages loaded in it. Firefox'll do the same thing for a third of that.~~ After disabling and re-enabling, it's barely using any CPU at all, so something else is at work here... Still a good tip for you laptop users where the F12 is an easier accidental overstrike than on the desktop keyboards.

Using Tiger, I've only had numbers like that when I'm running every widget I've got--when I close them all, Dashboard takes up nothing.

10.4 Tiger. Hearing enough pain about Leopard that I'm not going to install it 'til I have to for compatibility. Which may be soon, one of our customers is getting wonky redraw issues that don't happen under Tiger.

I was running the default widgets plus iStat Pro, which may have been the critical element, but... Huh. I just re-enabled it, and now Dashboard is taking very little CPU. So either there's something about having a lot of disk and CPU load that sent that combo off into a wacky place, or there's something else that caused Dashboard to get into a state where it was sucking down lots of CPU.

So Dashboard was just a red-herring, the search for the missing performance continues.

It wouldn't surprise me if a major factor is the amount of time you've left Dashboard and its widgets running. My experience is that there are a number of what appear to be WebKit-related memory leaks that do some nasty things after they've been running awhile.

I'm very much hoping that things are better (or at least different) with Leopard.

The major reason I restart my Mac(s) is because WebKit and its caches have started to become pigs, and the only ways to get performance back is to clear the caches. For Safari, you can do that with the Debug menu or by quitting, but for Dashboard, you need to whack the process, and the simplest way to to that is to restart.

Dashboard introduces some weird performance problems here and there. One googleMaps widgets I was playing with was horribly slow and piggy in dashboard, and very nice in the regular web page. Even after hacking the code to do browser check the same way.