Comment by nwh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwh | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

    >  I very much disagree with Messages being bugridden

• Using search hangs/crashes the client

• Having the client open for more than a few hours will use many gigabytes of memory (I'm at 2.5GB right now)

• Messages aren't in chronological order

• Messages randomly shuffle depending on network conditions (this is the biggest issue)

• Messages randomly don't appear, appear late, or spam notifications on arrival

• "Deleted" messages aren't, so the /Library/Messages/ folder fills with junk over time

• The dock badge will sometimes be wrong, displaying a number when it shouldn't, or even showing negative unread messages

• You can render anybodies Messages.app useless with a bunch of unicode messages. They have to delete their databases and start over.

It's literally the worst application I've used, and you're the first person I've encountered that doesn't feel the same way.

• Having the client open for more than a few hours will use many gigabytes of memory (I'm at 2.5GB right now)

  $ ps auxw |grep -i Message
  jordan   73227   0.0  1.4  4037928 113476   ??  S    13Apr13  13:21.86 Messages*

I've had Messages open for 17 days now and it is using 111 MB of memory (that's RSS, VSIZE is 3.85 GB). I have 4 accounts (three jabber + iMessage).

I don't know much about your other problems. My biggest problem with it is that it doesn't reconnect always when I start/end my VPN sessions, but other than that seems to work ok.

* Edited so it would display nicely.

So I decide to try Adium again after reading this thread, and quit Messages:

  panic(cpu 1 caller 0xffffff800d2a2a6a):
  ...
  BSD process name corresponding to current thread: Messages

You do have a point there. No doubt about it. I should have written my comment differently. While yes, I do agree Messages has issues and launched prematurely (and hasn't been updated enough to fix all those issues), Adium has been out for many years and so many problems I've been having with it have never been addressed. So - while yes, Messages is buggy, I'd say no Adium is not a more stable and productive replacement for it (in my humble opinion).

The only issue in the list above that I have experienced is the poor Library/Messages folder usage and that doesn't bother me at all.

I use Messages for everything and no longer use any other IM client - however - if Adium supported iMessage I'd totally go running back to the duck.

I think that might be where the difference is, it's the iMessage service simplimentation itself that is nasty — I've never used Messages.app to connect to AIM or Jabber.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com