Member Avatar for John A

I'm writing this to let you know that I've found "bug" in the Dashboard widget iStat. It's not a bug per se, but you should know about it.

iStat offers many statistics about your Mac -- amount of time running since reboot, temperature, fan speed, etc, etc. However, if you choose the option of listing currently running processes in iStat, after a few seconds, it starts the program lsof. This program sucks up about 98% of your CPU cycles, so your Mac might be slower. (It also might not, but of course running your CPU more than you need to is a waste of heat and power, especially on a laptop.) Quiting iStat does not quit lsof, however, so the process will keep running until either your reboot, or you quit it manually with the Unix tool kill.

iStat shows the process lsof only some of the time. I monitored it using ps -aux. Below you can see what lsof is doing to my cpu after I listed processes with iStat. My fans on my MacBook are getting louder and louder as I type this, and pretty soon I'll have to reboot.....

Oh any by the way iStat temperature monitor and fan speed doesn't work on MacBooks.

You have been warned!

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Member Avatar for TheNNS

i think i speak for everone when i say: who cares.

Member Avatar for John A

i think i speak for everone when i say: who cares.

It's a lot to care about if you're running iStat. Come on, 98% of your CPU usage? That's as bad as a virus (or spyware). If you don't care, then just don't post here. But I think it's important, because people do use iStat. And they deserve to know about it.

Member Avatar for 'Stein

TheNNS-

Watch yourself, that's all I have to say...

Member Avatar for MacJunkie

Yeah there are a number of other options that use much less CPU power even though iStat claims they use the least. The Dashboard in general eats up a decent amount of RAM once it's launched for the first time after each reboot/startup (until then the Dashboard items are not active). Disabling the Dashboard on older machines or machines without a lot of RAM can help a bit.

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