What is "Flash Player (DashboardClient Internet Plug-In)?

[downingp]

I have an i5 27" iMac and was curious why VMWare Fusion with Windows 7 was running so slowly. My iMac works at a snails pace when I try to run VMWare Fusion and anything else at the same time. I thought it might be a memory issue. I have 2 gb of RAM allocated to the virtual machine and 2 gb for Mac OSX. I was looking at the activity monitor and noticed that the Flash Player (DashboardClient Internet plug in) was taking up almost 600 mb of memory. What is the flash player that takes up so much RAM? Do I need to have it running? The other big program I am using that is taking up alot of RAM is PS3 media server which is taking up almost 500 mb of RAM.

Any ideas or advice? Thanks.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Sounds like a Dashboard widget is running Flash. Since Flash is notoriously inefficient, I suggest scrapping the widget.

 

[downingp]

That makes sense. I bet it's my Pandora widget I created. I obviously won't want to get rid of that. I guess it's either deal with the current speeds or buy more RAM.

Thanks.