Dashboard Widgets Slowdown??

dave marshdave marsh
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I installed Tiger on my 1GHz G4 iMac (with 768MB of memory) a week ago today, and this evening I found my Mac almost unresponsive. It hadn't actually locked up, but it was responding very slowly. A check of Activity Monitor (after waiting patiently for several minutes for the Mac to catch up to my mouse clicks) revealed that nearly all of my installed Widgets were hung (highlighted in red). I was able, using Activity Monitor, to kill each one individually to recover enough CPU cycles to gracefully restart the system.



Has anyone else experienced this behavior yet? I never shut down my desktop Macs, so I should know in another week whether this was an anomaly or something really is amiss with the widgets.



Concerning the other thread about widgets installing automatically following a download, I also disagree with this behavior. I wouldn't want to be spoofed into thinking I was clicking on a normal hotlink on a web page and finding it installing a Unix-specific virus using the widget's self-installing "feature." I hope Apple gives us a way to turn off this behavior and force us back into entering our admin password to confirm an intended application installation ... perhaps with a security update.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    johnqjohnq Posts: 2,763member
    Did you have a "sane" amount of widgets open, or, say, one clock for each of Earth's time zones?
  • Reply 2 of 6
    dave marshdave marsh Posts: 349member
    I had perhaps a dozen turned on, including clock, calendar, calculator, the stock weather widget, a US weather widget, a doppler widget, package tracker, dictionary/thesaurus, address book, the converter widget, and the stock ticker widget, oh and the Yahoo! traffic report widget.



    Since they don't seem to refresh except when you call them to the foreground, how could they slowly clog up the system? I neglected to check the amount of memory in use by each during this episode, but I'll be sure to check the next time it happens, because my CPU was NOT max'ed out.



    Thanks for the quick reply.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    carniphagecarniphage Posts: 1,984member
    You can restart a widget by clicking it with the mouse and pressing Command-R





    carni
  • Reply 4 of 6
    dave marshdave marsh Posts: 349member
    An interesting thing happened overnight on both my desktop Macs. The ~/Library/Widgets folder (the one in the user account) was deleted on BOTH Macs. My laptop was asleep, so it remained OK.



    Any ideas how this could have happened? The only thing that comes to mind for me is that Tiger's overnight system maintenance deleted it. But why?



    I recreated it this morning and put new copies of the widgets into it. We'll see if anything happens this evening.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    While developing a widget, i've managed to break the dashboard environment a few times. Things would start running slowly and a couple of the widgets would have flicker/update problems with their close control. Logging out/in fixed this particular problem.



    Is there a way to simply restart the dashboard environment?
  • Reply 6 of 6
    dave marshdave marsh Posts: 349member
    Well, overnight my Widgets folder in my users area remained active on both my desktop Macs, and all appeared well this morning. Since I chose to continue to use the US Weather widget, I'm no longer using the DoppleViewer widget, which seemed to have a conflict with it. Activity Monitor would show multiple duplicate processes running (three in fact) until I killed one of them.
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