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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache System 10.4
Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 7:30AM PDT • Contributed by: Anonymous
Over the course of the past few months, Dashboard had become painfully slow for me, sometimes taking 10 to 20 seconds to load.

I took a look at ~/Library -> Caches -> DashboardClient, and found that the Dashboard cache was 20MB. This seemed excessive (plus, I had a fairly recent backup), so I took a gamble and deleted all the files in the DashboardClient folder. Dashboard now loads almost instantaneously for me.

[robg adds: I was doubtful about this tip, but it did make a difference in my Dashboard loading time -- even the first-load time after a reboot was notably reduced.]
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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache | 15 comments | Create New Account
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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: kvanwits on Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 8:24AM PDT
Tried it out and works excellent. Good tip!

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: kainewynd2 on Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 8:47AM PDT
This works very well. I'm mildly confused because caches generally speed things up... oh well.

Well, for those interested I have removed the DashBoardClient folder completely and run the following command to redirect caches permanently to /dev/null:
ln -s /dev/null ~/Library/Caches/DashboardClient

So far so good. Everything is snappy and so much nicer than before. I'll post back correcting myself if this hurts anything.

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: gshenaut on Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 9:56AM PDT
It was interesting to use Terminal to cd into the cache directory and use the command strings */*/*.cache | more to examine its contents. Each file seems to be some kind of hash bucket containing a list of http-like records each preceded with a ^L (ascii newpage) character. For example, I frequently use a translation widget, and a bunch of the records in the cache are the results of translations I ran over the past month or two. I wonder why they keep things like old translations around that long in the cache?

Greg Shenaut

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: mcamou on Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 10:15AM PDT
Caches usually speed things up, but I think what might be happening is that the cache grows too large, so that it takes up more time to look things up in the cache than what it would take to generate/fetch the content anew. Just a theory.

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: mobius416 on Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 10:48AM PDT
Holy shit that's fast! I can't believe it made that much of a difference!

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: dbhill on Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 11:40AM PDT
Checked my Dashboard cache, and it was empty. Who ate my cache?! Perhaps it was the amazing YASU utility; it has a user cache cleaner. I run it weekly to keep in trim.
~Dennis

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: tjj on Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 1:30PM PDT
Hmm,
My Cache is at 68 KB! and last modified in December 2005.
10.4.7 here, I run the periodic tasks, well, periodically.

My Dashboard isn't very crowded, but I use it daily.

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: Azathoth on Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 5:54PM PDT
Wow!
That actually makes Dashboard usable again on my iBook G4
I always feel like looking things up on my HD slows the whole system down. Any suggestions what other caches could be cleared out to speed up overall OS performance further?

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: amavida on Wed, Oct 11 2006 at 7:01PM PDT
10.4.8 here, my caches were only very small 20 - 60kb but trashing them caused dashboard to pop up my sole widget instantly as opposed to 2-3 second delay... weird.

I'll keep an eye on this, maybe a bug report to the mother ship might yield some info.

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: Felix on Thu, Oct 12 2006 at 2:41AM PDT
I cleaned out the DashBoardClient folder (275K) and then set it to "Read Only." Everything works fine after a restart and it definitely speeds up DashBoard opening.

Great tip!!

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: jbayl on Thu, Oct 12 2006 at 6:31AM PDT
Mine was 20 MB. I deleted it, but there has not been a noticeable speedup. Of course, I wondered beforehand if it could actually speed it up, since I never wait for it to load... :)

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: plantguy on Thu, Oct 12 2006 at 6:49AM PDT
Powerbook G4, 1 Ghz, 1 Gb, 10.4.8
Quite amazing how well this works.
Went from 10-15 seconds to load Dashboard to < 1 second.


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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: macgruder on Fri, Oct 13 2006 at 4:11AM PDT
Nice tip!

How about going the whole hog with the Unix Paths.
~/Library/Caches/DashboardClient

rather than

~/Library -> Caches -> DashboardClient

Can't be that many people around who understand ~/ but not / :-)



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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: omar on Fri, Oct 13 2006 at 5:31AM PDT
in my cache there was just a 4kb file! maybe it's for Dashboard KickStart that I recommend....

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10.4: Speed up Dashboard by clearing out its cache
Authored by: spane on Sun, Oct 15 2006 at 10:06PM PDT
That folder (DashboardClient) doesn't exist for me... What do I do?

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