Out of control Dock process causing hangs.

[joesenior91]

So yeah, title says it all really.

so every hour or so my mac starts to hang, like video's stop playing (but the sound keeps going) scrolling stops, i can't get the dock up, nor change desktops. Eventually I figured out what was causing it by having activity monitor on in the background and seeing what happened when it hangs. Essentially the Dock process, as soon as it starts running, starts taking up more and more memory until it gets to about 400/500MB then everything hangs. If i force quit the process everything goes back to normal. i didn't have anything like this problem in SL. Any idea how to stop it?

FYI i'm running a late 2008 MBP with 2GB ram.

Cheers, Joe

 

[luis.s]

I am having this problem as well.

I have a 2.26Ghz 13" MacBook Pro and upgraded to Lion the day it came out. At first it ran fine, but for the last few weeks it often runs much slower than it did in Snow Leopard, sometimes getting to the point where the whole computer freezes for up to 5 minutes.

I investigated with Activity Monitor, and noticed the "Dock" Process is usually using about 100-200mb of memory, and will increase to using whatever memory is not being used by other programs whenever the computer freezes, using up to 500mb at these times. 100-200mb for the dock at most times seems too much, and 500mb is just crazy.

Does anyone have a solution? Searching the internet I have found a few people asking about it, but no solutions. It is becoming quite frustrating.

Edit: Also, I upgraded to 10.7.1 this morning, and have experienced 2 of these lock ups since, so 10.7.1 is not a solution.

 

[joesenior91]

Nice to see someone else with the same problem as me. For me the dock process has now got as high as 800MB, and everything (including the clock, which always freaks me out a bit) completely stops for 5-10 minutes. Really annoying, considering doing a complete wipe and installing lion from there. got some exams to get out of the way first, but if no solution comes up by then i'll let you know how it goes.

Cheers, Joe

 

[luis.s]

Nice to see someone else with the same problem as me. For me the dock process has now got as high as 800MB, and everything (including the clock, which always freaks me out a bit) completely stops for 5-10 minutes. Really annoying, considering doing a complete wipe and installing lion from there. got some exams to get out of the way first, but if no solution comes up by then i'll let you know how it goes.

Cheers, Joe

I was considering a clean install as well, but I read somewhere else that it didn't fix it for someone with the same problem, so it's probably not worth your time. And good luck with your exams

Also, for me it seems to be getting worse, I've had three complete lock ups today, where the computer is unusable and iTunes skips/stutters quite a bit if it is playing for at least 5-10 mins.

 

[joesenior91]

hey luis,

did you ever fix the problem? it stopped for ages for me but is now back with a vengeance. probably gonna do a clean install soonish see if that fixes it, but i thought it'd be worth checking to see if you found a fix.

cheers, joe