Best Widgets?

[WstCstCmtr]

Hi!

I've been using a mac since I got a white macbook in 2006... Just got a 2010 mba from macmall... Pretty happy so far, but my question is...

What is your favorite/most used/recommended widget you have on your dashboard?

I have some extra real estate that I am looking to fill with some good suggestions!

And I posted into the mba forum because now I have one and I want to be part of the group!

 

[IngerMan]

Dictionary

 

[oneMadRssn]

iStat Pro
JuneCloud Delivery Status
Radar In Motion

 

[thankins]

You do realize that these take up RAM - which is a precious item on the Airs. No need to "fill" you screen

 

[onthecouchagain]

You do realize that these take up RAM - which is a precious item on the Airs. No need to "fill" you screen

How much RAM do those widgets take up? Is there anyway to tell the impact? Do they take up RAM when you call them up, or even in the background when they're not directly in use?

 

[WstCstCmtr]

Really?

Activity monitor is right out 66mb...

Seems insignificant to me.

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How much RAM do those widgets take up? Is there anyway to tell the impact? Do they take up RAM when you call them up, or even in the background when they're not directly in use?

My activity monitor didn't really show a difference whether I hadn't swiped to the dashboard in an hour or when they were refreshing.

 

[GGJstudios]

Widgets do use some system resources.... some more than others. If you're looking to maximize performance and battery life, removing any unnecessary widgets can help to a small degree. As far as RAM usage, if a handful of widgets tips the balance between not paging and paging under normal use, you don't have enough RAM to begin with.

iStat Pro is my most useful widget, followed by pearLyrics.

 

[onthecouchagain]

Is it worse to have more page ins or more page outs? ... um, what?

EDIT: I don't understand what either of those things mean, but I know they indicate whether you have enough RAM or not.

 

[WstCstCmtr]

Ya i don't understand that either... but like someone said.. if a couple widgets are making that much of a difference then you should have got the 4gb.

 

[GGJstudios]

Is it worse to have more page ins or more page outs? ... um, what?

EDIT: I don't understand what either of those things mean, but I know they indicate whether you have enough RAM or not.

You will always have page ins, but you may not ever have page outs, which occur when your RAM is maxed out and contents of RAM have to be saved to the hard drive to make room for other data to be "paged in" to RAM.

Launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

There is no meaningful correlation between page outs and page ins. As I said, you will always have page ins, but you may not ever have page outs. Also, you can run for weeks or months, accumulating page ins, then go through a period of intense activity for only a few minutes which produces page outs. No ratio between the two is useful. The only thing that indicates a need for more RAM is the presence of significant page outs during normal workload, regardless of the page ins.

 

[WstCstCmtr]

Thanks for that great explanation!

So how long should you wait to check back to see your page outs?

I just checked and I am at 592kb and the last time I turned off my computer was at least a week ago? You said 1gb is a sign of needing more ram so ~600kb is nothing really... right?

So, ram is full -> page out = write to hd... but is that such a big deal with an ssd? Isn't it supposed to be super quick at retrieving things?

 

[GGJstudios]

Thanks for that great explanation!

So how long should you wait to check back to see your page outs?

I just checked and I am at 592kb and the last time I turned off my computer was at least a week ago? You said 1gb is a sign of needing more ram so ~600kb is nothing really... right?

600kb is nothing at all to worry about, especially if you run your normal workload for a week and that's all you have. That means you rarely max out the RAM you have. You wouldn't see any performance improvement by adding RAM.