06-21-2005, 06:03 PM

I've noticed my Powerbook is slower since I upgraded to Tiger; I get the beachball a lot now, despite 1GB / 1.5MHz, and my cooling fan is running a lot more than it used to, even when nothing much is apparently running.

Top shows that DashboardC is consistently hogging 25-35% of my CPU cycles. I have a fairly well-populated Dashboard, but I'd naively assumed the applets would "sleep" when Dashboard wasn't actually showing.

Is there a way to "nice" Dashboard or otherwise tell it to chill out a little? Or do I have a rogue widget?

And what's it actually *doing* when I'm not looking at it? I don't have any widgets which are feasibly doing anything *useful* when Dashboard is hidden.

I'm getting a little tired of having a slow machine, less battery life and a constant fan whirr, just for something I use twice a day.

Thanks,
David

06-21-2005, 06:21 PM

I've half-answered my own question.

I used Activity Monitor to be a bit more specific on what in Dashboard was doing the hogging. It turned out to be Dashboard for my other user (which doesn't have anything loaded apart from the standard widgets). I switched user and opened Dashboard, it then quietened down and is now running OK. (There's a good chance the other user hadn't opened Dashboard since logging in.)

I'm still mystified as to why Dashboard should hog 35% of the CPU to do nothing at all, and why it should stop hogging the CPU when I showed & hid it, but hey, at least I know how to solve the problem now.

06-21-2005, 06:26 PM

I think some widget check for internet updates on a regular basis (i.e. the weather widget checks the updated weather status etc)
That's why they "run" in the background...

06-21-2005, 06:29 PM

I have noticed that if you don't use Dashboard for a specific period of time, Dashboard's widgets will become inactive. Whenever I launch Dashboard, almost all the widgets fire up and bog down my mac while trying to update themselves from being inactive.

06-21-2005, 06:36 PM

thats exactly why im still on 3.9