If you haven't been paying attention to the memory usage of your Dashboard Widgets, you should check out how much Active Memory they are taking up via your "/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor". If you hadn't noticed their memory usage is always increasing. After running 4 Apple supplied Widgets: Weather, Stocks, Calculator and Dictionary, for a week they were taking up to 20 MB each! They start around 6 MB when launched, but as time goes by they take more and more memory. I actually noticed my computers performance decreasing which lead me to this discovery. Others, have reported the same issue, with some people claiming their Widgets are using up to 300 MB.
For now, I've removed all Widgets from my Dashboard until Apple releases a patch. As a fix, you can restart the dock since the Dashboard process is owned by it. Or you can manually remove the Widgets from the Dashboard. Using Activity Monitor, you can "kill" the Widgets and they will restart.
If you guys check out your Widget memory usage and its huge, let me know. My friends Weather widget was taking 75 MB of Active Memory!
I can't believe the amount of hits this article is getting. Seems like more people are finally realizing this is a major issue. 10.4.2 is due soon, hopefully they will have a fix.
The current record holder in the comments is 517M for the Weather Widget!
For now, I've removed all Widgets from my Dashboard until Apple releases a patch. As a fix, you can restart the dock since the Dashboard process is owned by it. Or you can manually remove the Widgets from the Dashboard. Using Activity Monitor, you can "kill" the Widgets and they will restart.
If you guys check out your Widget memory usage and its huge, let me know. My friends Weather widget was taking 75 MB of Active Memory!
I can't believe the amount of hits this article is getting. Seems like more people are finally realizing this is a major issue. 10.4.2 is due soon, hopefully they will have a fix.
The current record holder in the comments is 517M for the Weather Widget!
dl
Posted by Dan Lacher on May 25, 2005 at 09:57 AM EDT #
Posted by Jonathan on June 05, 2005 at 04:44 PM EDT #
Posted by Ben Lewis on June 19, 2005 at 10:59 AM EDT #
Posted by Jason on June 23, 2005 at 10:49 AM EDT #
Posted by John Noonan on June 29, 2005 at 05:27 PM EDT #
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
killall Dock
Good luck
Posted by John Noonan on June 29, 2005 at 05:29 PM EDT #
Posted by Jonathan Jacobs on July 06, 2005 at 11:03 AM EDT #
Posted by marc dale on April 19, 2006 at 03:45 AM EDT #
Posted by n[ate]vw on September 10, 2006 at 01:30 AM EDT #
Has anyone found a cure for this problem? Since adding a couple of widgets to my website I noticed a huge chunk of memory is being used. I would greatly appreciate a fix to this problem.
Thank You Sincerely,
Ken
Posted by Ken on April 03, 2009 at 06:02 PM EDT #
Ha thanks very much for this, i noticed performence slowing on my work terminal and had a look at the other users on the machine. One ex employee had a dashboard clock using 1.10GB of real memory yes GB! no wonder my side was slow.
lol
Posted by Simon on May 05, 2009 at 06:01 AM EDT #