Mid-Match hang due to smart dashboard?

[Jefferson]

I'm not sure if it would help with your situation, but we write a LOT of data to the dashboard. The more we write and the longer we do it, the more issues we see with SmartDashboard.
Therefore, we link as many of the Dashboard writes as we can to a joystick button press, so the robot is only writing for a brief period. The majority of the writes are used for debug.
Now if you're using NetworkTables to send back information to the robot (like vision processing) you can recompile SmartDashboard to use the available UDP port instead of the TCP port it uses now. This seemed to help us in 2012. We haven't attempted driver's station vision processing since. We decided keeping the camera off the network was a priority.