dock and processing power

The Dock is AltiVec-optimized, so I'm guessing you have a G3. I have a 550MHz G4 and it appears that the Dock consumes about 10% of the CPU on my machine (but I have mine scaled to about half its default size). You have my sympathies...

Alex

 

When I run my mouse over the dock the process "Window Manager" goes up to 40-60% with the dock.app taking 3-6% also, but as soon as i come off of the Dock it goes straight back down again.
FYI. My Dock icons are pretty small but I do use the Zoom feature, if you don't want your CPU to get used up much when using the dock I would suggest turning off this feature and see how it goes.

 

In 10.1.x, the magnified Dock is a CPU WASTER. It stresses Quartz/Windows Manager to the max to create this bling-bling effect. It's really meant to grab people's attention or to store a large amount of apps. But for the average user, magnification is bad.

If you do like this effect no matter what, wait for QE and it won't take an CPU power and it will be faster (providing you are QE supported).

Otherwise, it'll slow your system way down in 10.1.x and 10.0.x and can even make your applications launch slower. Please don't tell me you make the dock bounce too?

 

I had dock magnification and bouncing turned off for a while, but I finally decided that I PAID $2300 FOR THIS COMPUTER AND I WANNA SEE THE PRETTY DOCK ANIMATIONS GODDAMNIT. I've done some unscientific testing and the dock bouncing does not noticeably affect application launch times for me. The magnification is a small CPU hit, but it's been nearly 6 months and I STILL like to just mouse over and watch the icons move, so it's worth it.

 

I'm pretty sure that 10.2 "Jaguar" will fix this problem with Quartz Extreme, but one thing about that movie that's up here. I thought 10.2 changed the mouse to a bevel shape. the movie showed an "old" mouse. Has the new mouse icon been trashed.

 

From what I understand, the new mouse shows up in Cocoa apps, but it's the same old one in Carbon and Classic apps.

Seems kind of schizophrenic to me, but whatever...