OK, I've worked out what the problem is. Exchange Server. Well, not exactly, but it is involved.
If you have Evolution configured to use a MAPI account, and you're a reasonably large site, you have a *lot* of contacts in the Exchange Global Address Book. Anything using libfolks seems to pick this up and load them all into memory - I've just discovered that gnome-contacts and gnome-shell also both use about 700M too much memory on my machine (login with gnome-shell takes *forever*...) when I have a MAPI account configured. If I disable the account, login is fine, empathy is fine etc. The problem appears to be that the different uses of a contact list/address book are not being handled differently - I *need* the addresses available in evolution in order to e.g. autocomplete site- local email addresses, but I have no use at all for most of them when using empathy or gnome-shell! I have no idea what interface libfolks provides, so no idea whether this problem is caused by empathy/gnome-shell/gnome-contacts misusing libfolks, or whether it is (which is my suspicion) a design flaw in libfolks - assuming that loading the contacts of an address book into memory is a reasonable thing to do, which it ain't. Please feel free to reassign/duplicate this bug as appropriate. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to empathy in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1006197 Title: Empathy is an insane memory hog Status in “empathy” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: 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) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/1006197/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
