Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Beta
Digsby multi-protocol chat client seriously cuts RAM usage
Early builds of Digsby have been known to eat over 100MB of memory. If you've got 4GB of RAM, that might not seem like much. But if you have an older PC with 1GB or less, there's no reason that a messenging program should eat up 10% or more of your memory.
A few days ago, Digsby pushed out a new alpha release that addresses the memory issue. I find that the alpha version tends to hover around 30MB of memory use, and according to the developers, it shouldn't go much higher than 50MB even if you register a ton of email and social networking accounts.
The new version also features other performance enhancements, and improvements that will attempt to help you get around firewalls and proxy servers if necessary. There's also a new crash reporter.
Keep in mind, the latest version of Digsby is still in alpha, which means there are likely plenty of bugs to be worked out. Normally I wouldn't recommend replacing stable software with an alpha. But if you've been frustrated with Digsby's high resource usage in the past, you should really check out the latest version. Just make sure to backup your settings first.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
I.G.L.E.S.I.A.S said 5:53PM on 8-13-2008
is it just me or is that title misleading... I thought this was a light software not a RAM hog...
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Steven said 1:32PM on 8-12-2008
I'm using pidgin, connected my corporate sametime and to yahoo. It is currently taking up 17 mb.
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Paul said 4:33PM on 8-12-2008
I'm using Pidgin with a Skype plugin and 9 total accounts (1 Skype, 5 AIM, 2 Gmail, 1 MSN), it is only taking 25mb.
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wichenroder said 6:01PM on 8-12-2008
Digsby is certainly sweet.
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slimpikens said 5:24PM on 8-14-2008
I loved Digsby because it allowed me to use several yahoo identities all at once. Loved it up until I realized when I approved work contact requests it sent all my aliases. Some of them not at all work friendly. I un-installed Digsby that day and haven't been back.
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amir said 11:28AM on 8-18-2008
no way under 50MB ...
i'm using it now , with only 3 acounts : msn icq & gmail
about 100 contacts on my list.
95MB RAM USAGE !!!
THATS ALMOST A FULL 1MB PER CONTACT !!!!
i'm going back to pidgin...
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