Gajim 1.5.0 and 1.5.1

Gajim 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 come with a significant performance boost. Pinned chats can be ordered via drag and drop, message corrections have been improved, and many bugs have been fixed.

What’s New

For many years, Gajim’s internal handling of how a chat is loaded and displayed hasn’t changed. Each chat would create a new Control, which would hold the chat banner (name, chat state, etc.), the conversation view (messages), and a message input, including actions and menus. This approach does not scale well, since Gajim’s resource usage would increase with every new chat. With Gajim 1.4, we introduced a new conversation view, which increases the overall number of elements being displayed at the same time. Multiply this by the number of open chats, and you’ll get a lot more elements, which have to be rendered all at once. Due to some GTK theming issues (looking at you, backdrop animation), every focus/defocus of Gajim would lead to a spike in CPU usage.

To overcome these limitations, we changed Gajim’s fundamentals. The whole chat window with all its elements is now created only once, and then shared between all chats. Gajim just switches each element’s state when switching chats. Due to a drastically reduced amount of elements being loaded, this change alone reduces Gajim’s RAM usage by 20 %. With less elements being rendered at once, the delay ‘from click to action’ is also significantly reduced. In other words: Using Gajim feels more snappy.