Dock Process High CPU Usage (No Parallels, Already Tried Deleting dock.plist)

What happens if you do a Restart? What happens if you kill the Dock process in Activity Monitor or using the Terminal command: killall Dock? What happens if you remove the .db, .lockfile, and .plist files for the Dock then restart the Dock using the afore-mentioned Terminal command.

I am also having the same issue. Within an hour of starting a simple Windows 7 x64 VM - using 1 core and 2GB RAM - the processor usage and memory go through the ceiling on the Dock process. Literally using all available CPU processes and over 2-3GB of memory itself. This is not a usable or acceptable bug. I need to use Windows 7 for work and I cannot afford to spend time restarting things every 2 hours. It uses so many resources that time machine cannot back up and eventually the whole system becomes unusable - and not in the generlly thought of way but in th way I remember windows being when explorere and everything that goes with it was crashing. I have some theories and I am going to try to turn off the 3D aceleration and see if that makes a difference but I really hope this gets the attention of VMWare. I enjoy a lot of the feature the seperates Fusion from Parallels. I work in IT and need to be able to interchange and use different VM's on the fly before they go to our ESX server and/or other VMware workstation PC's. If it wasn't for that fact alone - I may very well already be downloading Parallels. I will update with how the 3D adjustment goes.

UPDATE (over an hour later): After Shutting down the VM and going into the settings - to help you that dont know (Virtual Machine>Settings>Display) and turned off the 3D Acceleration (which I don't need for my work applications) the problem seems to have stopped. The dock is now not going over 32 MB of memory used and the CPU use is stable (generally arond 0.1% or lower) !!!!

I hope VMWare fixes this soon, but for now this will be a decent workaround. Hope this helps more of you! I will repost this over at apple support.

I've been struggling with this as well. It seems to be linked to VMWare, and I've found it happens on both my Win 7 VM and my XP VM. I have 3D Acceleration OFF but this still occurs. I have deleted the com.apple.dock.plist, com.apple.dock.db, and com.apple.dock.plist.lockfile and it seems to solve the issue for a while, several hours in fact, but if I leave the VM running, it eventually comes back.

This is severely impacting my work and I'm desperate for a fix. I sure hope we can figure this one out quickly!

2.4 Core 2 Duo White Macbook 4,1 Early 2008

4G RAM

256G SSD & 500G OptiBay HD

OSX 10.7.2

VMWare 4.0.2

JSRossie, Thanks for logging the request with VMWare, I'll do that also. I checked the settings you recommend, but that is exactly how all 3 of my VM's are already setup, and this hasn't changed. So I can confirm that this issue crops up even with the "Never" selected and nothing checked under "Default Applications".

This same problem is now showing up on the new MacBook Pro Retina models, and appears to have nothing to do with Parallels or VMWare. Rather, it looks like it is related to the desktop background image. After migrating from an older Mac, I experiened the problem. Much digging later, it appears my "galaxy" background image didn't come along for the ride. You can tell if you hide all the windows and take a look at what your background looks like in Finder. If it's blank and gray, that's probably your problem.

The solution is to change the background picture (right click or control-click on the desktop and choose "Change Background Picture", or do it in the Settings app). Assign a new picture to the background. Then, force quit the dock app in Activity Monitor. When it restarts itself in a few seconds, its CPU usage will miraculously drop to almost zero.

@rjm3245 Thank you! I had tried all the other suggestions: I uninstalled VMWare Fusion (cleaned it all up by hand) and everything. Nothing worked, but I did find that the secondary display on one of my virtual screens had no background.

I assigned a background, force quit Dock just like you said, and it's now sitting at 0.0% of my CPU!

Same here 2012 Macbook Air 11" no parallels or other WM installed (or have ever been installed)

Assigned a desktop background and everything is fine.

What I know I have done however is assign a background from a picture in preview I think it was. And later deleted the folder with the pic.

To add to this, I was noticing a high CPU usage for the Dock; but very irregular - like 1% jumping up to 40% the next second.

I then remembered after I read rjm3245's tip, that I had set the background, to change every 5 seconds, because it "looked nice" - I forgot that the iMac was doing this all the time, even when I was working on other things, so it was eating up the CPU.

I have unclicked it, and now all is more normal - although I miss my changing desktop backgrounds.

Thanks for the tip that made me look as I couldn't work it out why a process like the dock was taking up so much juice.

You only mentioned Parallels wasn't involved. You didn't state originally you were using VM Fusion. We aren't mind readers, you know. 😀

Your suggestions for VMWare did the trick for the new MacBook Air! I had moved over my old info via Time Machine, and the machine was just running SO hard.

Thanks!