Professional Geekism

I’ve had a re-occurring issue with pidgin randomly screwing with my CPU usage; actually maxing out a single core for no apparent reason and/or crashing thereafter. In actual fact, I think I can even attribute a few recent gnome-panel crashes to this behaviour, as well.

Today I’ve been informed (by my darling girlfriend) that her buddy icon was out of date: she’d changed it a while back, yet my client was appeared to be stubbornly displaying the old icon, even weeks later. As I couldn’t find a method for forcing the buddy icon to update within the program itself, I navigated to ~/.purple/icons (finding approximately 1,660 cached icons!) and deleted the lot.

Since restarting pidgin it’s taken a while for the buddy icons to repopulate for some reason, but after a few tests, it does appear that they’re updating properly when changed by the other party. As a side effect, I believe I’ve found (and fixed) the cause of pidgin’s leak/loop/error! Hopefully someone else will find my serendipitous bug-squashing useful.

I may even launch a bug report, given that I couldn’t find one. Now all I need is time to do so…