Slow system performance? Jerky video playback or other effects? I know the reason...

[Jalexster]

I was having major problems with playing back videos in MPlayer, with jerky, unresponsive video playback. I could get better performance out of VideoLAN, at the expense of dropper frames. That and VideoLAN tends to start playing your media, and the video stream won't show up for the first 10 seconds. Vert y annoying.

I tried closing ALL other apps. Even the Finder, and performance was still bad. But then I remembered something I saw in the Activity Monitor when I had to go and kill a process manually a short time ago. Taking the initiative, I went and fixed the problem. 30 seconds later, my system was back to normal, and videos were playing fine.

What did I do to fix it? I closed every single Dashboard widget.

Yep, those Widgets use up waaaaaaay too many resources. Let me give you an example.

Ok, I'm gonna open up Activity Monitor. Now, I currently have NO widgets on my dashboard. I'll go add two World Clocks, one Weather and one Stock Viewer. Now, lets go check the Activity Monitor.

World Clock DashboardClient is now using up 10.16MB of real memory, and 119.43MB of virtual memory! Weather DashboardClient is using up 11.59MB of real memory, and 120.11MB of virtual memory.

Now, this is with just FOUR DAMN WIDGETS. Imagine what would happen if you had many, many more open. I would think that a few of us do...

So, in conclusion, if you want to help speed up your system, cut down on your Widgets. Or do what I do. Don't use the Dashboard at all.

 

[JeDiBoYTJ]

You know what ticks me off about that? they use so much damn memory, and yet they dont update in real time, they only update if you activate Dashboard which usually takes a good 5-10seconds before they refresh... really annoying when I just want to simply check the weather real quick or soemthing

I found I dont use Dashboard all that much as I thought I would, i might just deactivate it too until apple fixes the problem somehow...

 

[lssmit02]

If not updating, not taking resources?

Just because the widgets reside in virtual memory, that doesn't mean they're sucking up ram from other apps when they're not active, does it? If they're not updating, isn't OS X, as a Unix based operating system, able to page out that memory for use by currently active programs, to be recalled when you need the information from your widgets, but not until then? At least that's how I understood OS X handled memory.

 

[daveL]

Just because the widgets reside in virtual memory, that doesn't mean they're sucking up ram from other apps when they're not active, does it? If they're not updating, isn't OS X, as a Unix based operating system, able to page out that memory for use by currently active programs, to be recalled when you need the information from your widgets, but not until then? At least that's how I understood OS X handled memory.

You are correct. I also haven't noticed the default widgets consuming much in the way of CPU resources. I really can't see the widgets being the issue, nless you don't have enough real memory to begin with.

 

[CubaTBird]

dashboard needs to be streamlined.. and the way u dl em from apples site is not so great.. they should group em into categories or something.