Beware of Internet Explorer IE 9 & Gadgets - sidebar.exe

I don't want someone else to experience the same as I and others. I'm into virtualization big, so memory and cores are the only ducks in my pond. I also have a few gadgets that help me keep track of where things are at when I'm running the VMs, and the MS program gadgets plug into is called sidebar.exe.

Today, things were getting frustratingly slow. I only had one VM running. My secondary drive is my only mechanical, and it's where the VM inventory is because of their size, but today it was huge busy. But it was tough to get any thing done system-wide. The VM was updating, but still... I flipped to the desktop where the monitoring tools are, and noticed that all 8 threads were busy, and were in the mid-thirties. That's odd because the VM only gets two virtual CPUs and 2 gigs of RAM. My page file was almost 8 gigs which I'd never seen before, but doesn't really matter unless I were to get a lot of hard faults. I checked the resmon window and it showed I was getting over 39,000 hard faults per second. I was going to open another gadget that I have for monitoring things like this, and it only displayed the first three, and the titles of the next two. It didn't even fill in the title on the window header. I checked resmon to see if there was any one thing, or a combination of things that might not be so easy to figure out. It took about 1 click to find it. Sidebar was consuming 2.7 GIGS! of memory. I shut the whole mess down, and restarted. It didn't help even a tiny bit.

I did a little Googling and found others who encountered this problem after installing IE 9. BINGO! I had just done that. I uninstalled IE 9, and went back to 8. Now everything is lightning, my gadget inventory works, 0 bytes in my page file, I'm using 1/8th the memory, and the CPU bars disappear because they don't have enough to do.

TTYL

 

The computer is only 2 weeks old, and I took in IE9 through the Microsoft Updates. Once you uninstall it, and revert to 8, it will come right back if you don't hide the update because it is categorized as important.

 

Are you running Vista or Win7?

Have you considered rainmeter in liu of gadgets? It's much less resource intensive.

 

It's a two-week-old Dell M6600 Mobile Workstation, Windows 7 Pro, and i7-2720QM.

Without IE9, Sidebar takes 28M-47M of memory, and it bounces between 1% and 2% of one thread, with all gadgets running. Not having IE9 is of no concern to me. I like IE8's interface better than IE9's in the first place, and secondly, I don't use IE for Internet browsing anyway.

I did look at RainMeter's site. I didn't see from there that it does what I use gadgets for. I use them to monitor CPU speeds, CPU cores, RAM, page file size, top processes for CPU, RAM, and hard faults, network traffic, temperatures, etc. When I double-click on them, they bring me to the affected area in Resmon. I don't use gadgets for clocks, calendars, weather, or anything like that.

Thanks!

 

You can get skins for cores, maybe speeds, ram, page, network traffic. Not sure about hard faults, top processes, or temps.

Given what you've described, it's not wonder sidebar is taking up so much space. Each gadget runs about as much RAM as everything that rainmeter can do as a whole. Then... add in that you're not doing clocks and what not, but things that are constantly reading/reporting.

I don't use gadgets because they're resource hogs in relation to their size. That yours use so much RAM is both surprising and not surprising at the same time.

 

First of all, I like the way you can theme everything with Rainmeter. It gives you freedom to design your desktop theme with integrated functionality. If what you need is a clock, weather, a battery gizmo, and RSS feed, neither require many resources, and nothing is easier than dropping a Gadget on a desktop. However, the Gadgets that I use, are system monitoring programs, that periodically read Windows system counters, produce real-time information and graphs about the computer's performance, provide drill-down capability to further research the information, and can log in case you want to graph trends over time. If one were to spend the time to write these for Rainmeter, they would require the necessary resources as well. With Rainmeter it would look nicer when it was finished, but it would also take more effort to create and change. My only requirement is they provide me the situational awareness to provide the foundation for good decisions, so I can carry out appropriate action, similar to the way the panels do on a flight deck with a glass cockpit. In this case they located the problem, and Google provided the documented experiences of other people who correctly identified the cause.

Thanks!

 

Why don't you try Chrome? IE with multiple tabs open is a resource hog (IE 8 included) Chrome is a little bit better

 

I don't use IE. You must have IE of some version to get your Microsoft updates. IE 9 came with the security updates. I use Firefox because I'm also a developer, and I need the plug-ins. I do have Chrome, but only for testing web sites during development.