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Last post Author Topic: Why Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk..  (Read 76945 times)

f0dder

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Okay, I wonder wtf's up with Trillian, and how come Josh has so low memory values. Even after enabling pagefile on my system, I get the following stats. Note that this is with trillian not connected to anything (since I had Miranda running) - and with Trillian only having run for a couple minutes but Miranda since I booted my computer (XP doesn't require reboot to enable pagefile).

stats_miranda.pngWhy Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk..stats_trillian.pngWhy Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk..

I wonder what's with all the pagefaults in trillian - it just keeps increasing, increasing and increasing. And you can also see that, although it's been running for a lot less time, trillian has gobbled up more CPU time than Miranda. Nothing significant, but still more "hoggy" than miranda :)
- carpe noctem

pob

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To use several IRC servers, I just copied IRC.dll to IRC2.dll etc. - should work with other protocols too.
Yep, that worked nicely :)
I've now set up the tabbed message window and added some smiley capability and it's looking quite useful

Is there any plugin that supports displaying custom user emoticons from the newer MSN clients?  Even better if it was possible to steal them ;)

f0dder

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pob: custom emoticons are just about the only feature I personally miss in Miranda - dunno if anybody has written a plugin for it.

Btw, even with MSN it's easy enough to "steal" them, just right-click and add... the files are stored somewhere under documents and settings, with "weird filenames" though.
- carpe noctem

pob

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Yeah I know you can get them with MSN.

On the other hand, so many of the emoticons are really annoying, in some ways it's a blessing not to suffer them. :Thmbsup:

jgpaiva

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pob: custom emoticons are just about the only feature I personally miss in Miranda - dunno if anybody has written a plugin for it.
I agree. If miranda had support for custom emoticons, i'd switch right away. Until then, i'm stuck with msnmsgr taking 1/4th of my ram :'(

f0dder

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Hm, actually it does seem like Miranda has some support for custom emoticons - check <installpath>\MSN\CustomSmiley after having a conversation with someone that used some custom emotes.

Now, how to get them displayed in the conversation...
- carpe noctem

skwire

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And I'm happy that Miranda doesn't do any text formatting, that's a plus for me :)

I concur whole-heartedly; plain-text only for me as well.  I've been using Miranda for several years (since it was an ICQ-only clone) with minimal issues.
« Last Edit: February 08, 2007, 07:49 AM by skwire »

f0dder

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And the memory usage investigation continues. Josh's very low memory usage values were because he uses a more recent Process Explorer than I do, and only looked at the "Physical memory" status. So, I upgraded to PE10.21, and did a little investigation. I also confirmed that trillian indeed does do the SetProcessWorkingSetSize() hack - setting breakpoints in OllyDebug shows the following:
toolkit.3401C411 - on startup
toolkit.3401B7AC - on minimize

The mem stats are right before the initial SetProcessWorkingSetSize() call during startup phase, right after, and right after the process has "recovered":
trillian-1.pngWhy Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk..trillian-2.pngWhy Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk..trillian-3.pngWhy Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk..

Just for fun, I whipped up a little utility for trimming other processes, and ran it on Miranda. This is a bit less precise than with trillian, since the process isn't in a suspended state, but it still gives normal-use, right-after-trim, recovery-after-trim:
miranda-1.pngWhy Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk..miranda-2.pngWhy Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk..miranda-3.pngWhy Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk..

All this shows what?
1) trillian uses dirty tricks to camouflage it's memory usage
2) trillian does, in fact, use more memory than miranda

PS: this is still with miranda logged on to msn+icq, trillian not connected. Memory usage is expected to rise a bit more if I actually log on with trillian.
- carpe noctem
« Last Edit: February 10, 2007, 09:14 AM by f0dder »

Josh

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Memory size tactics aside, trillian still performs, handles, and generally is more responsive on my system. So, as I said in the IRC channel, I dont care what methods a program uses to lower its memory usage, the fact that it uses little RAM, paging lesser used routines and data to disk, is still a big plus to me. Trillian is very responsive, doesnt require a lot of configuration to get things running in a method which is pleasing and easy to use, and runs very fast on my system. Yes, the startup might take a couple of seconds more, however, as I've said in this thread, I dont look at this as a negative being that I have to restart miranda several times a day due to crashes so totalling up the startup time of the crash experiences to the startup time of trillian puts miranda at a big disadvantage.

But anyways, to each their own. If you want something that just works, and supports more of the features of the official clients, then trillian is better for you. If you want a very minimalistic approach, with gobs of configuration options, then choose miranda.