Pidgin memory leak on Intrepid

[Sylvestre Mergulhão]

Binary package hint: pidgin

Pidgin never (until now) consumed to much memory... More than firefox with many tabs open! It's crazy :)!

Protocols used: MSN, XMPP(gtalk).

How to reproduce: open pidgin, talk for some hours and look at system monitor.

All system updated.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/pidgin
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: pidgin 1:2.5.2-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/home/username/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=pt_BR.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: pidgin
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-7-generic x86_64

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

Hello,
I also use Pidgin on AMD64 and Intrepid. And I use also XMPP but not MSN and I do not have this problem. You could disable MSN temporary in order to find out if the MSN module has the memory leak.

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

There are also many bugs about this, so this could be a duplicate, e.g. Bug 200392 (If disabling sounds helps, then this should be another bug) or Bug 273587 for instance. Just search for "pidgin memory leak". But first you could try to see if it has to do with MSN or sound. Thanks for helping to make Ubuntu better!

[Sylvestre Mergulhão (mergulhao83)]

Disable MSN helps a little but the memory consumption is still very high to pidgin, take a look at the screenshot. If the memory of your pidgin is similar to this ok, we found probably a leak in msn feature. But it is still to much memory to pidgin... I also have a notebook with ubuntu 8.04 i386.. pidgin never gets more than 100mb(I'm in doubt but I think it never gets more than 50mb).

Do you think the history logs(the messages with your contacts) can be related? Oh my .purple dir have only 23mb, I don't think it's much log.

Its not related to sound (Bug 200392), my sound is always disabled. I don't know if is related to Bug 273587, because the problem is pidgin with high memory consuption, and not free memory going lost.

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

Interesting. My Pidgin uses ~50mb (which is actually too much for such an easy gtk instant messenger). I have no idea if this could have to do with the size of the logs. :/

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

Whoot! I just opened a few chat windows and minimized them and opened and closed them again and suddenly I had ~150 mb! RAM is cheap today but this really must not be. :(

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please try to obtain a valgrind log following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind and attach the file to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

Here is a valgrind log. I dunno if it used that much ram this time (inclusive valgrind 500 mb). Would be interesting which caused the main ram usage (if a developer could look at this I am very thankful)

Thanks!

[Stepan Roucka (rouckas)]

I have the same problem, pidgin consumes gigabyte of memory after few days of running.

[Jean-Rémy Falleri (jrfaller)]

Hello!

I confirmed that I also experience this problem, and I think that it is a really important bug because it tends to make pidgin not usable.

I have played a little with pigdin and here is what I noticed:

When pidgin is started, only a small amount of memory is used (around 4 Mo).

After a little while, and without doing anything, pidgin use 20 Mo. This is the amount of memory I would have expected for this type of software.

I have noted that if you keep doing nothing, this amount of memory do not change.

Now the bad things begin:

Try opening ten conversation tabs, even using the same protocol (example: MSN), now pidgin uses around 70 Mo, and I have not sended a single message yet. It seems strange because pidgin conversations widget seems light so 70 Mo seems a lot of memory to me, but whatever...

Now I close all the tabs. Pidgin is still using around 60 Mo, so I suspect something is going wrong with the conversation handling: closing a conversation should close the associated resources. Maybe this is wanted by the developers, but in this case it is normal that after one day of intense chat, pidgin will be consuming more than 200 Mo of memory, but I think this is not acceptable for an IM client.

To confirm this behavior, I have launched pidgin using Valgrind, opened 6 tabs and closed everything, waited 30 secs and closed pidgin.

Inspecting the valgring log was not significant, it seems that the leak is not coming from pidgin itself. So I started to check the pidgin bugzilla and I have possiblly have found the source of the problem: spell checking!!!

Doing the same experiment (with tab opening, etc...) after having disabled the spell checking option in pidgin leads to a stable memory use (around 16 Mo as expected).

So, can everyone that suffers from this bug disable spell checking and test the memory use of pidgin and confirm this behavior, please ???

Cheers!

[Sylvestre Mergulhão (mergulhao83)]

Confirmed behavior posted by Jean-Rémy Falleri.

[Nelson Lago (lago)]

Testing very lightly yet, I also believe I have Jean-Rémy's described behaviour. Pidgin 2.5.5 in jauty.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, it has been some time without any response or feedback in this bug report and we are wondering if this is still an issue for you with the latest release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal, May you please test with that version and comment back if you're still having or not the issue? Please have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/download to know how to install that version.Thanks in advance.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for pidgin (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]