Adium is great, but ...

... why does it eat so much of my laptop?

Over the past few years, I’ve bounced back and forth from iChat to Adium more times than I can count. Until recently, I had been using iChat for quite a while, mainly due to only needing AIM, and the fact that Adium eats my laptop. Many of the folks at mSpoke use Yahoo! Messenger, so I switched back to Adium for integrated AIM/Yahoo messaging. Here’s a snap from Activity Monitor:

That’s with Adium as the frontmost app (snapped with the wonderful Capture widget). I’m using some very simple themes, and when I snapped that, I had no chat windows open, and my buddy list was hidden. Adium consistently hovered around 11 - 13% of CPU time.

Adium developers, what’s going on?

For the record, the CPU usage is similar when my buddy list is visible. The memory usage seems reasonable, but it tends to shoot up when I have message windows open.

Here’s another snap with Adium not as the frontmost app.

Interestingly, in the background (with the same theme settings, no chat windows, buddy list hidden) it eats much less CPU, from about .8 - 1.2%, even though the number of threads is the same. That’s much more tolerable, but it does make me wonder what the heck is going on inside the app when it is in front.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do like Adium, I just wish it was a bit less resource hungry, especially when I choose to use (what I perceive to be) very simple settings.