pidgin hogs all system memory

[rihasant]

Binary package hint: pidgin

Basically the bug is that pidgin goes mad and takes all available memory on my pc. This has happened a couple of times now. First time it happened I had no clue what had happened, my system simply stalled and I had to do a hard reboot. Second time, which was today, I noticed that there appeared message in dmesg, saying that pidgin has invoked oom-killer.

To be honest I don't know if this bug is caused because of pidgin, but that is my guess. I also don't know how to debug this, so here is some random info. Hopefully this helps..

2.6.24-17-generic
pidgin 1:2.4.1-1ubuntu2

[Anton Belyaev (anton-belyaev)]

I confirm this bug.
This happens to me too after upgrade to Hardy.

Several minutes ago pidgin started to eat system memory and I had to kill -9 it.

[rihasant (riku.hs)]

I recently realized that this bug was caused, when pulseaudio dies. In other words, if I killall -9 pulseaudio pidgin will go crazy and this bug occurs.

[Nick Demou (ndemou)]

just a me too comment

My system was almost completely unresponsive but I managed to switch to console and I issued a top command to see tens of pidgin processes using 72% of the system memory (now that everything's fine I see less than 5% memory usage)

pidgin 2.4.1
2.6.24-18-generic #1 SMP Wed May 28 20:27:26 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

[knightcoder (knight-coder)]

My Pigdin App is running silently in the task bar and suddenly, it hogs up memory upto 75% and the memory also spills over to the swap making everything extremely slow. A pigdin memory leak issue on Hardy]

[Osama Khalid (osamak)]

Same problem, but with the CPU as well as the memory.

[Mattias (mattias-webben)]

Same issue here, seems to be rather extreme.

When I went to bed last night my memory allocation for processes was like 5%, when I woke up now the system was more or less non-responsive.

I have 8gb of system memory, should take some time for a little messenger to fill that up imo. ;)

[Sjur Gjøstein Karevoll (sjurberengal)]

I believe this bug affected me as well. Unfortunately I don't have much to add.

What happened was:
I hadn't been using pidgin for a few days, but it had been idling in the background for weeks with normal memory consumption. I then got a message from a friend (MSN) and we exchanged a couple of lines before he went offline. I sent him a link just a few seconds after he went offline. I switched apps and 30 seconds later noticed I was hitting swap. The system monitor said pidgin was using 2.4GB (status sleeping), the chat window 2.8GB and had the status "Not interruptable" ("Kan ikke avbrytes" in norwegian; I'm afraid I don't know the exact string the english localization uses). Killing and restarting it seems to return everything to normal.

[Malcolm Lalkaka (mlalkaka)]

I am having this same issue, and I also know how to reproduce it. This issue occurs anytime you send an offline message to an MSN contact who was originally online. So for example, send a few messages to an MSN contact while she is online, then after she goes offline, send an offline message to her in the same window. Pidgin will start consuming all the memory on the system, and will eventually crash. I think it may be caused by or related to this bug: http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/7508 . That bug has yet to be fixed; it was only closed due to inactivity after 14 days.

I am using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope with all updates.

[Digital5700 (edward-edwardh)]

This bug is still in v2.6.2

As soon as you offline message someone it will hog all the memory (even the swap) until it either crashes or you kill it.

[vili (skeith-1003)]

I have Pidgin 2.6.6 and this just happened to me but I didn't offline message anyone I joined a (fairly large) IRC room and it seemed to happen right after that. I was unable to reproduce it.

[aPoC (apoc)]

Me too.

But a bit more weird.

Pidgin was in the background for an hour. (Normal memory consumption) Then I started WinXP in vBox and ERROR: "Host low memory". I thought Java/Netbeans was eating up everything so i tried to close it: Click on Close button... wait... 4 minutes.... I got unpatient and issued "killall java"... No reaction... "sudo killall -9 java"... worked. But I was still lagging. Re-opening the terminal I just closed took the system 3 minutes! Then I managed to start the System monitor to see whats going on and... "huh?! Pidgin? 607 MB? Holy cow!". (then used kill -9 on pidgin). And everything was fine. Its running and its fine...

Pidgin had only one MSN account to *@live.de server.

(Linux Mint 10. Running programs: vBox (paused) and Netbeans 6.9.1, Dropbox, Skype. Having 1GB RAM).
Well, 2.7 GB swap usage.

[Mörgæs (moergaes)]

Is this still a problem using 13.10?

[Mörgæs (moergaes)]

Closed due to age.
If a similar bug appears in 13.10 please open a new report.