Skype consumes extremely large amount of ram before crashing when loaded on boot

[Alan Goodman]

I have skype installed, configured to sign in automatically and start via the startup applications dialogue.

In the past 24 hours my system has been hanging for 5 minutes following log in with solid hard disk activity. After the machine becomes responsive again I noticed that skype was no longer running and that the machine had swapped out 200MB of ram to disk.

I added gnome-terminal -x top to the startup and noticed that skype was using 70% of my system ram before the system froze up.

Completely uninstalling skype and reinstalling it fixed the problem for a couple of reboots but then the problem recurred.

Removing skype from startup fixes the problem and I can start skype manually if I want to without issues.

If provided instructions I can probably attempt to provide further debugging information as I am a fairly proficient user...

[Alan Goodman (zgzx6-alan-kecso)]

Forgot to mention my system is a Lenovo X220 laptop with the i5 2540 cpu and 4 gb of ram.

System is brand new, less than 75 hours use and less than 10 battery cycles.

[Alan Goodman (zgzx6-alan-kecso)]

This is also hapenning randomly when I start skype after boot up.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Assume this is fixed in the new upstream 4.0 version.

[Ghislain Vaillant (ghisvail)]

It does it systematically on my netbook running xubuntu 12.04. Right after launching it, the system becomes completely unresponsive. Going to try whether the new 4.0 fixes it.

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

Hi, a new skype version 4.1.0.20.0-0ubuntu0.12.04.2 is available, could you please try if you still have the bug with the new version?

If you still have this problem please set the status back to "new".

thanks

[agoodm (alan-goodmanemail)]

This was fixed in a later release of skype that wasnt released at the time of creating this bug report.