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I have a very annoying problem with the Dock process - after more than a few hours of uptime, the memory usage will spike to more RAM than I have. The process will begin to thrash the hard drive at the maximum speed that it can (according to iotop), and it will regularly use more than 100% of CPU, which I guess means that it's using more than one core at the moment. The number of threads in use ranges between 5 and 12.
Even though I have 12gb of RAM, I regularly start running into the swap file, and I have to kill the Dock process. This resets the amount of memory that it uses to about 60mb, but within minutes, it will be taking up more than a gigabyte again.
Because of the high memory usage, CPU usage and swapping, this regularly makes my computer entirely unusable. Given that this is my main work machine, I will have to probably reinstall it soon if I cannot find a solution, and I can only hope that reinstalling it will actually fix the problem. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before?
Thanks for the tips. While I had found the Parellels article in my searching, I didn't realise I still had it installed after dropping it in favour of VMWare Fusion. I performed the steps as directed, but it didn't seem to have any effect. Also, there is no mention of very high RAM or IO usage in the article. I'm going to try the other steps, the issues should manifest in a day or two if resetting the dock doesn't help. Thanks for your time! – Steve Rukuts – 2011-11-01T09:55:26.540
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Interestingly, as soon as I quit VMWare to restart, the Dock process started behaving normally again. I have now found this issue related to VMWware and Dock CPU/memory usage: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/333119?start=0&tstart=0
– Steve Rukuts – 2011-11-01T10:16:52.270It seems like a good article, and it is worthwhile to try out all the mentioned solutions. Did you try resetting the dock as in my answer ? – harrymc – 2011-11-01T10:24:52.993
The suggested workaround is to turn off Shared Folders until VMWare fix this. I'm going to trial this for a couple of days. – Steve Rukuts – 2011-11-01T10:31:21.533
I didn't try resetting the dock because I don't want to change too many variables at once, otherwise I might never be sure of what was wrong. – Steve Rukuts – 2011-11-01T10:32:01.720
Turning off Shared Folders worked, all is good with the world. Thanks for prodding me on to that train of thought; enjoy some delicious reputation! – Steve Rukuts – 2011-11-06T17:06:16.533