[Bug 1006197] [NEW] Empathy is an insane memory hog

[Nick Phillips]

Public bug reported:

Using empathy makes my system practically unusable. It is the tree-trunk
that breaks the camel's back. I do have several accounts configured, but
most are disabled. The only ones enabled are one jabber account and one
google talk account. Disabled are facebook, aol, yahoo,
bonjour/zeroconf/rendezvous, and a couple more jabber accounts. Empathy
takes an age to start up (and the window is greyed while it does so),
individual chats take an age or fail completely to start, and looking at
top output, it's pretty clear why:

top - 14:38:26 up 5 days,  1:30, 11 users,  load average: 1.23, 1.33, 1.36
Tasks: 265 total,   1 running, 261 sleeping,   0 stopped,   3 zombie
Cpu(s): 14.9%us,  6.2%sy,  0.0%ni, 78.1%id,  0.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   4030516k total,  3775940k used,   254576k free,    62624k buffers
Swap:  1952764k total,  1218700k used,   734064k free,   500484k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                  
30634 nwp       20   0 1939m 705m  23m S    0 17.9   0:56.23 empathy                                                  
16872 nwp       20   0 2018m 271m  30m S    0  6.9   2:28.71 evolution                                                
23101 nwp       20   0 3167m 237m  18m S    9  6.0  15:58.82 empathy-chat

For a relatively minor component of a running desktop system, that kind
of memory usage is completely inappropriate. It's not even as if it
(empathy) has been running for a long time, as I regularly have to kill
it to be able to use some other part of the system. I have no idea why
it takes so much, but please please please make it stop! - I've been
evangelising empathy for years now, and I'd hate to have to eat humble
pie and go back to pidgin ;-)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: empathy 3.4.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-24.38-generic 3.2.16
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-24-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx wl
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu7
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed May 30 14:39:02 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: empathy
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-04-30 (29 days ago)

** Affects: empathy (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: amd64 apport-bug precise

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Title:
  Empathy is an insane memory hog

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