Zip.ca Dashboard Widget

The attached comment from MacInTouch today might be of interest to you. You guys are contributing to slower computing!

10:10 EST Dean Waterman tracked down a surprising performance problem:

In response to the people who say that their new PowerBooks are slow, mine was too. I had to get a new one to solve part of the problem, but the new one was still a little slow.

The problem? You would never guess…

My Genius at the Apple Store put the Activity Monitor on my dock so I could open it and see what was going on in the memory and hard drive. I was using the max CPU and memory and could not figure out why. That was until I found the culprit… widgets!

I thought, incorrectly I found out, that when you put widgets aside and cleared them off of the desktop they ceased to work, but that is not the case. Once they get fired up, they are always in the background updating and finding the latest info (if available). This caused many applications to run slow, especially Safari!

The solution, I got rid of most of my widgets. They are primarily a novelty anyway, so why not. If you are running 1GB or higher, you may not notice that much of a difference in getting rid of them, I don’t know. But with the stock 512 RAM, you notice a significant difference when they are out of there.

Hope this helps someone. Special thanks goes out to my Mac Genius, Jeremy, at the Apple Store in the Mall of America. He is the best I have ever had. Will ties pretty close, though, in the same store.

Hmmm. Interesting point. I’ve since turned off all of the widgets I never use.

On a dual-processor G5 with a paltry 1 GB or RAM I can afford to leave a few widgets open, especially my Zip.ca widget.

The comment above is not strictly accurate. Like all programs that run resident in memory widgets do require system resources. However, it is only poorly coded widgets that continue to access safari when the dashboard is not visible. The zip.ca widget, for example, only pings the zip.ca server ‘onView’, meaning when dashboard is viewed. At all other times its processor requirements are non-existant and it’s memory use is minimal.



It makes sense that additional widgets would gobble of memory. They are little apps running through a manager (dashboard). We wouldn’t keep open unneccessary desktop apps if we didn’t have too so it seems odd that people think that they can open all the widgets in the world and not have an adverse impact.



As to contributing to slower computing, if people choose to run a useful app which by the nature of apps requires system resources, that’s hardly an offense.



If you really want to speed up a memeory starved mac, shut down spotlight. That is an app that is a relentless memory hog, continually indexing the file system.