I downloaded and tested WengoPhone 2.0 beta today. While I was impressed by the fact that it offers free IP-telephony and basic chat support for MSN Messenger, AIM/ICQ, Yahoo, and Jabber/Google Talk–all in a Free open-source application–I was shocked by its memory usage. As I’m running an aging Dell Inspiron 8500 with 512 MB of RAM while developing software in Visual Studio 2005, memory usage must be kept at a minimum.
Currently, I use the Google Talk client (for IP-telephony and it’s sexy user interface) and Miranda IM (for basic MSN/ICQ/AIM support). Here is a memory usage comparison between these three clients:
| miranda32.exe: | 7096 KB |
| googletalk.exe: | 13 472 KB |
| qtwengophone.exe: | 44 956 KB |
So, it turns out WengoPhone uses twice as much memory as Miranda IM and Google Talk put together! Is this the result of using the Qt framework, or is it simply because of poor coding practices? While WengoPhone sure looks more feature-rich than the other two clients, it’s mostly just a matter of menu items and widgets that calls external commands. You begin to wonder just how many features WengoPhono keep constantly loaded in memory as opposed to just loading them when needed (and unloading afterwards).
by Neil T.
15 Aug 2006 at 17:36
Trillian doesn’t even use that much – usually it needs less than 10 MB of RAM and 30 MB of virtual memory.
By the way your CAPTCHAs are really hard to read, even for someone like me who has good eyesight. Is there not another anti-spam system for Wordpress like Movable Type’s Comment Challenge plugin (which I use on my site – it asks you to type in phrase)?
by David Tenser
15 Aug 2006 at 21:06
Neil, I agree. There was some tweaking options for the plugin, I’ll see if I can make it less aggressive.
by Neil T.
15 Aug 2006 at 23:37
Thanks, it’s better now
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