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10.4: Quickly free up RAM used by Dashboard widgets
Authored by: bkuestner on Aug 05, '05 04:17:31PM

This will be a tough wake-up call for many to see just what a memory hog OS X is compared to even Windows on the same Intel hardware. It will be plain embarrassing for Apple and OS X afficionados:

Safari with only this window open: 60 MB
Calendar widget: 19 MB
Mail: 50 MB

This list could go on and on.

The kernel coming in at "only" 40 MB, now that is acceptable.

For the old Mac OS the rule was, that a Mac could do with less RAM than a comparable PC running Windows. For OS X ... no more! This OS eats all available RAM for breakfast and then craves for more.



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10.4: Quickly free up RAM used by Dashboard widgets
Authored by: deleted_user18 on Aug 06, '05 05:30:14AM

So what? 1Gig DDR-RAM costs 100 Euro.



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10.4: Quickly free up RAM used by Dashboard widgets
Authored by: DrLex on Feb 04, '06 04:06:40PM

That's a bit of a lame excuse. Especially if one's Mac has a hard upper limit on the amount of RAM that's needed to feed memory gobbling applications without causing excessive swapping, like my old iBook. Using Safari together with Photoshop is a guarantee for swapping. Even the date menu causes swapping in such situations. And of course Dashboard too, by the time it has loaded I could have grabbed a physical calculator.

Yet, widgets use around 10MB of RAM on my machine. Although it's kind of funny that a basic calculator now uses more memory than the entire OS + applications back in the days of System 8, it's not dramatic considering that each widget is actually a tiny web browser. Of course widgets could have been implemented much more efficiently, but then it would be a lot harder to make new widgets, while now anybody with HTML and JavaScript knowledge can make one.

By the way, each widget has a VSIZE of 150MB, which may seem rather enthousiastic. But since VSIZE actually doesn't mean much, this is nothing to write home about. VSIZE is _not_ the amount of swap used by a program, otherwise my HD would gone nuclear on me as soon as I start up Classic, Safari, Firefox and Dashboard.



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10.4: Quickly free up RAM used by Dashboard widgets
Authored by: adrianm on Aug 08, '05 06:31:43AM

You should probably try to understand what the memory numbers mean before forming an opinion and ranting publicly.



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10.4: Quickly free up RAM used by Dashboard widgets
Authored by: Taiichi on Apr 28, '06 11:32:48PM

bkuestner, you have a point.

No-one should ever need more than 640K of RAM.



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