This program is great but it hogs the systems, uses almost 40 megs of RAM to run, a bit much for a simple instant messenger. Not only that but it seems to make most of our PCs simply drag their feet. I can’‘t find a rhyme or reason behind it. Usually Spark’'s processor usage is at 100% during these times. You might way between 10-20 seconds for it to switch from the contact list tab to the conferences tab.
Some direction here would be cool.
Hi twm1010,
I cannot repro the slow part of the app. On my machine, it takes up between 40-50 megs of memory, but only about a 100ms to switch tabs. What systems are you running on?
Cheers,
Derek
50 MB, that’'s insane…
I have ICQ consuming 7 MB, and spark hogging 50 MB…
Might have to think about better memory optimisation for sure?
Jicks,
We are working very hard to get that number down. Some of it has to do with the fact that it’'s running a Java VM, however we are still looking at many ways to bring that number down.
Cheers,
Derek
We are running this on Windows XP SP1 and SP2, all the machines are Dell, but varying in model.
Since this uses Java VM I am going to try updating to the latest version of Java to see what difference that makes.
I’‘ve heard memory consumption should be better on java 5 (aka jre 1.5) although the big performance improvements are slated for the next Java release. Your OS should swap the mostly idle memory to disk so your normal operation shouldn’'t be severely affected unless there is a reason for poor swap performance (e.g. make sure you have a good amount of free disk, you defrag your disk regularly, etc).
-iain
Do you all think there is any way you’'ll optimize it enough to make Spark reasonable on a Terminal Service environment? There is just no way in the world we can use Spark for our corporate IM solution in a Windows Terminal Server environment with it using 40MB of memory. Multiply that by a few dozen users and you have a server capitalized by an IM client.