Comment 10 for bug 302132

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!