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ThisGuy · May 9, 2005, 02:02 PM

Is there any way to kill Dashboard so that it does not run at all or is it something like Expos� and is considered a feature? What should I look for in Activity Monitor?

Hi I'm Ben · May 9, 2005, 02:11 PM

You should first look for the search button on the forum. go from there.

Meanwhile, it's integrated into the dock. It's within the package contents as dashboard.app

starman · May 9, 2005, 02:12 PM

How about never pressing F12?

ThisGuy · May 9, 2005, 02:13 PM

Thanks for the wonderful answers! pffft.

fisherKing · May 9, 2005, 02:13 PM

Originally Posted by starman

How about never pressing F12?

it would still be there...in the background.

King Bob On The Cob · May 9, 2005, 03:51 PM

No it wouldn't. Dashboard only loads up if you activate it.

Applefreak01 · May 9, 2005, 04:26 PM

Originally Posted by ThisGuy

Is there any way to kill Dashboard so that it does not run at all or is it something like Expos� and is considered a feature? What should I look for in Activity Monitor?

It is considered a feature of the OS and doesn't show up in Activity Monitor as Dashboard.app. Don't have any active widgets and it won' take up anymore RAM than what it does to run in the background. Which I would think isn't a lot. I have 640MB RAM in my iBook, and about half of that free just like in Panther. So that tells me Dashboard isn't a huge RAM hog when inactive. Only when you have widgets running does it eat your RAM up a lot.

I used it at first just because it was cool and new. Then I seen how much RAM those widgets take up and killed them. Maybe if I had a Power Mac G5 with 4GB of RAM I wouldn't care

Mafia · May 9, 2005, 04:37 PM

hmmm, i not really seeing a lot of ram being eaten by my widgets. i probably have 8 open, plus ichat, mail, safari, and itunes and i'm only using 287 mb of ram, that seams very low. hmmm

willed · May 9, 2005, 05:55 PM

Jesus! Unit convert takes up 40MB! I remember when my entire system ran in 32MB (well, on a Mac Classic it was 4MB, but still)! 'Command and Conquer' and 'Riven' tended to take up about 8MB or so. Now dictionary takes up 9MB! That's it, Dashboard is going bye-bye.

Applefreak01 · May 9, 2005, 07:54 PM

Originally Posted by Mafia

hmmm, i not really seeing a lot of ram being eaten by my widgets. i probably have 8 open, plus ichat, mail, safari, and itunes and i'm only using 287 mb of ram, that seams very low. hmmm

http://72.9.248.26/~joshcisn/images/widgetmemory.jpg

I had those 4 widgets running along with Safari, grab, and proteus.

Mafia · May 9, 2005, 08:35 PM

Originally Posted by Applefreak01

http://72.9.248.26/~joshcisn/images/widgetmemory.jpg

I had those 4 widgets running along with Safari, grab, and proteus.

well i can't say that i'm upset its not using much ram. but literally i got 15 dashboard items open all the time. and ichat, mail, safari and itunes never close on my computer

CharlesS · May 9, 2005, 08:37 PM

I made a little "Hello World" app in Cocoa that looks like this:

As you can see, about as simple as it gets. The "Hello World" button puts the text "Hello, World!" in the text field. Ooh. Ahh.

Fired it up, then fired up my Dashboard with the Calculator, Yellow Pages, Dictionary, Translation, Unit Converter, World Clock, Weather, Address Book, and This Day in History (a third-party one) open. Here's the results:

Note: The first time I fired up the Hello World app, it took over 14 MB instead of just 10.

News flash: Widgets are mini-apps. Apps use RAM on OS X. Big surprise! It's a non-issue because the Virtual Memory system in OS X actually doesn't suck, unlike the classic Mac OS.

goMac · May 9, 2005, 09:18 PM

As Charles said, probably at least 3/4 of that memory is coming from the swap file which is :drum roll : on the hard drive.

Gamoe · May 9, 2005, 09:29 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

News flash: Widgets are mini-apps. Apps use RAM on OS X. Big surprise! It's a non-issue because the Virtual Memory system in OS X actually doesn't suck, unlike the classic Mac OS.

Still, one wonders why these mini-apps are being so liberal with their use of memory, when as willed said, before the Mac OS could exist and perform using what only one widget requires today. Just because memory is abundant on today's hardware does not mean one should be inefficient. And, virtual memory is also slower and taxes the hard drive.

CharlesS · May 9, 2005, 10:33 PM

Originally Posted by Gabriel Morales

Still, one wonders why these mini-apps are being so liberal with their use of memory, when as willed said, before the Mac OS could exist and perform using what only one widget requires today. Just because memory is abundant on today's hardware does not mean one should be inefficient. And, virtual memory is also slower and taxes the hard drive.

Well, your double-buffered windows are gonna take some RAM right there. You didn't have that in the mid-90s. Plus, the graphics on those things are 16.8 million colors, whereas you were probably using 256 back in 1995 or whenever your system was only using 32 MB of RAM. Plus, your widget is using WebKit, so it's got a little web browser loaded into RAM. Throw in some caching so that you don't have to wait for the thing to start up every time you invoke the dashboard, and voil�!

Food for thought: In 1995 when 8 MB was a lot for an app to use and 4 MB was normal, well go back 10 years earlier to 1985, and you'll find that 4 MB is absolutely insane because your Mac only has 512K of RAM! OMG! System 7.5 is a RAM hog!!

Gamoe · May 10, 2005, 03:06 AM

Responding to CharlesS's reply:

Point taken. All I'm saying, however, is that though resources are plentiful on today's platforms, that isn't an excuse to be wasteful with them. And I wonder if Dashboard and its widgets couldn't be more efficient in their use of memory and cycles.

Back in the times of more limited computing resources, developers were forced to be more efficient with their use. While all of today's extras are nice, and some actually help one be more productive, it disappoints me to see, for example, how slow Pages is on my 1Ghz. Mac, sometimes not keeping up with my typing, while (the original) AppleWorks on an Apple //e had no trouble keeping up and was relatively fast.

CharlesS · May 10, 2005, 11:41 AM

Originally Posted by Gabriel Morales

Back in the times of more limited computing resources, developers were forced to be more efficient with their use.

Stuff was pretty fragile, though, because of that. Look at all the stuff for the original 9-inch Macs written in 68000 assembly. As soon as new versions of the OS and hardware came out, stuff would break left and right in the classic era. Some stuff from a relatively more modern era may be less efficient, but it'll still run years later, even under OS X in the Classic environment.

ambush · May 10, 2005, 12:11 PM

Charles... did you by any chance run the app with XCode?

Try launching it from the Finder...

CharlesS · May 10, 2005, 03:25 PM

Originally Posted by ambush

Charles... did you by any chance run the app with XCode?

Try launching it from the Finder...

I've tried it both ways. When launched from the Finder, it still starts eating RAM to get to the level I showed if you do anything with it, such as popping up any menus, activating the About box, etc.

OS X likes to cache things. That takes up RAM.

glyph · May 10, 2005, 08:41 PM

Is there any way to kill Dashboard so that it does not run at all or is it something like Expos� and is considered a feature? What should I look for in Activity Monitor?

from the mac os x thread to neutralize dashboard:
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...45#post2517145

goMac · May 11, 2005, 03:19 AM

Originally Posted by Gabriel Morales

Responding to CharlesS's reply:
Back in the times of more limited computing resources, developers were forced to be more efficient with their use. While all of today's extras are nice, and some actually help one be more productive, it disappoints me to see, for example, how slow Pages is on my 1Ghz. Mac, sometimes not keeping up with my typing, while (the original) AppleWorks on an Apple //e had no trouble keeping up and was relatively fast.

Sorry to bring this thread back from the bottom of the page, I had meant to reply earlier.

The problem is that Apple is porting more of their software to Cocoa. And while Cocoa is nice and all, it is very memory intensive and slow. I wrote a game engine in Cocoa once, it was so slow I just ended up rewriting it in mostly C/Carbon. It flew after that. With all this hype about how Cocoa is the way all OS X applications should be and how Carbon is crap, it's often overlooked on how much faster Carbon could be. OmniWeb was a very slow browser because it was written almost entirely in Cocoa. I wouldn't be surprised if almost all the code for WebKit/Safari wasn't C or C++.

You have AppleWorks, which was written in Carbon, vs. Pages which was written in Cocoa. Yeah, Cocoa is nicer for building applications, but you really have to be careful, or else it can be dog slow. Cocoa puts a lot more strain on memory (and CPU because it does a lot more messaging) than Carbon.

chrisutley · May 14, 2005, 12:58 AM

I put Dashboard.app in the Trash, rebooted and the Dashboard was still there. What's the deal? Apps cannot run in the Trash, so what was going on?

My temporary solution is to trash all the widgets.

CharlesS · May 14, 2005, 01:12 AM

Originally Posted by chrisutley

I put Dashboard.app in the Trash, rebooted and the Dashboard was still there. What's the deal? Apps cannot run in the Trash, so what was going on?

The Dashboard is an OS feature. Dashboard.app is just a tiny app to invoke it. It's not responsible for the Dashboard, which is actually owned by Dock.app.

My temporary solution is to trash all the widgets.

All you have to do is simply not invoke the Dashboard.

CatOne · May 15, 2005, 10:49 AM

Originally Posted by ThisGuy

Is there any way to kill Dashboard so that it does not run at all or is it something like Expos� and is considered a feature? What should I look for in Activity Monitor?

Why not just open up dashboard and close all the widgets? The widgets are what take the RAM; if you don't have any running at all, it's awfully lean.

jasong · May 15, 2005, 11:31 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

All you have to do is simply not invoke the Dashboard.

I hate your answer. It doesn't give me the chance to be stupid and screw up the system. This prevents me from making pointless stabs at Apple and spoils my dreams of making the big MacNN statement . . . "I'm switching to Windows!"

Maybe if I delete my System folder. It used to fit on a 400k floppy back in the System 1 days, it can't be that important . . .

almar008 · May 16, 2005, 02:33 AM

Originally Posted by ThisGuy

Is there any way to kill Dashboard so that it does not run at all or is it something like Expos� and is considered a feature? What should I look for in Activity Monitor?

You want to kill dashboard...it wouldn't wonder me if you asked macnn how to kill finder!

consider dashboard as one of the necessary apps that must be running while you run tiger. Believe me it does not affect the performance of your computer.

Just drag the icon out of the dock if you don't want it to be there.