I was pretty pleased with the new Trillian 3.0 I upgraded to a while ago. It looks nice, and performed well… until recently.
For some reason I noticed some sort of typing lag when chatting, which is extremely annoying, especially if you can type pretty fast like me. You tend to think some keys went missing somehow, so you retype them, and then they appear double, so you start deleting, which lags as well, and then you delete too much…. ghaaaaaaaaa!!! frustration guaranteed! There’s something really annoying about the feeling your machine is slowing you down that makes you want to smack it, uninstall, and try out GAIM oslt.
Yesterday it lagged out on me again, in a bad way. Unusual disk activity, hardly responding to key presses, almost crash-like behavior, and worst of all, looking stupid when you type rubbish into a chat window… But then it stopped as soon as I closed a certain IRC chat window.
Hmmmm, odd…
I figured it out today when I checked the log files Trillian keeps. For some reason it keeps 2 of them for each session. A plain text file, and one in XML format in the IRC\Channel folder. For the IM networks it keeps the XML copy in the \<IM network>\Query folder.
I’m not sure why this is, but I’m guessing maybe the Pro version has a search facility which works with these XML files.
Anyway, when those files get big (like around 16MB in my case), Trillian seems to be getting in trouble appending new messages to them constantly. It would be neat if they would have implemented a way to rotate those log files automatically.
It’s a simple feature which is lacking in a lot of software unfortunately. Programmers should realize that log files, or whatever kind of files their software automatically creates might eventually become too large to be handled properly by the software itself, or the operating system.
Starting a new log file as soon as a given limit is reached (lets say 10MB) would solve this issue without having to bother the user (yep, me) with it, or in this case, giving the user (which is, again, me) the impression Trillian is slow and laggy.
I renamed the files manually for now, and judging from the first logged entry in the textile, I should be safe for about another year now… :)
