empathy-chat consistently uses 9-10 % CPU

thanks for the bug
can you please attach the picture or other visual medium to show us your processor values.?

top - 17:27:03 up 8:01, 3 users, load average: 0.07, 0.08, 0.07
Tasks: 205 total, 1 running, 204 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.5%us, 0.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.1%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 7971500k total, 4990992k used, 2980508k free, 257880k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 3428296k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 2792 michael 20 0 1899m 69m 29m S 9 0.9 0:15.37 empathy-chat
 2660 michael 20 0 519m 21m 11m S 2 0.3 0:29.52 gnome-terminal
 1269 root 20 0 203m 31m 7748 S 1 0.4 5:08.52 Xorg
 2161 michael 20 0 1446m 82m 27m S 1 1.1 4:18.74 compiz
 1247 root 20 0 7428 420 300 S 1 0.0 0:14.88 gpm
 1260 root 20 0 15964 692 512 S 0 0.0 0:03.78 irqbalance
 2418 michael 20 0 2026m 53m 31m S 0 0.7 0:07.39 empathy
 2830 michael 20 0 17432 1400 976 R 0 0.0 0:00.02 top
    1 root 20 0 24576 2524 1380 S 0 0.0 0:00.93 init
    2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 kthreadd
    3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:01.99 ksoftirqd/0
    6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
    7 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.10 watchdog/0
    8 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/1
   10 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.98 ksoftirqd/1
   12 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.09 watchdog/1
   13 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/2

This happen also to me, empathy-chat window always at 9% on a Intel i7 2600K with 8gb of ram

I've also the same problem. I've attached a screenshot of htop, maybe it helps.

i say when you start empathy there is load of some thing like that affects the cpu but it remains same when empathy gets loaded ?

Just tested (by having XChat-GNOME open before I opened Empathy; since Empathy still can't handle alternative IRC nick names this prevents IRC from starting) and the CPU load remains normal until the chat window opens. Does that answer your question?

so so i have also seen this when we open the chat window the cpu usage increase but when we open the empathy cpu usage increases but come on stability after the loading..

sending this bug to upstream you please subscribe to that one and make comments

As per the GNOME bug, I confirm that switching from the "Ubuntu" theme to the "Clean" theme fixes this for me. I realise that this isn't really my business, but given that Ubuntu has limited development resources available, it it really the most efficient use of those resources to maintain their own Empathy theme? If Ubuntu wants to do work on Empathy I could think of better ways to improve the user experience.

I think that this issue can continue here, someone have to just add "adium-theme-ubuntu" (or something related to webkit, like suggested by developer) in the "Affects" section.

i have filed it there

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Until this bug is fixed... is there a recommended alternative to empathy?

XChat-GNOME? Or if you really want to stick with Empathy (do try XChat though!) you can just change the theme.

I can confirm that this bug only exits with ubuntu theme.

I did some testing and this bug only appears when using Ubuntu's adium theme so it's either a theme bug (like some js infinite loop or something) or a webkit-gtk one. I can reproduce this bug on F17 as well.

I won't have time to investigate this issue further but the next step could do to try some profiling using Webkit's inspector tool:
- gsettings set org.gnome.Empathy.conversation enable-webkit-developer-tools true
- Open a chat with the adium theme
- Right click and select 'Inspect Element'

It would be cool if some webkit(-gtk) could take a look on this issue.

I don't think we use to have this bug with the previous ubuntu version. So another useful thing to do would be to bisect through the theme history and find which commit introduced this bug.

I tested this with the maverick version of the theme on quantal and could still reproduce this. I am certain this wasn't a problem in the past. I guess something in webkit?

Until the window is filled vertically, the process enters some loop. In analyzing syscalls, it's a half dozen clock_gettime()s and then a rather expensive poll() of a socket along with a recv() that fails. Loop about 200 times per second.

12:13:37 recv(8, 0x8a19060, 4096, 0) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
12:13:37 clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {256453, 277724784}) = 0
12:13:37 poll([{fd=6, events=POLLIN}, {fd=8, events=POLLIN}, {fd=12, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}], 5, 0) = 0 (Timeout)
12:13:37 clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {256453, 277835655}) = 0
12:13:37 clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {256453, 277924856}) = 0
12:13:37 clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {256453, 277967429}) = 0
12:13:37 clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {256453, 278011174}) = 0

Verification is simple, open a chat window with someone where the history doesn't fill the chat window and leave it sit idle. While it is open, check the load created by the empathy-chat process.

Regression potential: Low, this really just slows down how aggressive the javascript is in detecting how close it is to the bottom of the window.

This bug was fixed in the package adium-theme-ubuntu - 0.3.3-0ubuntu1

---------------
adium-theme-ubuntu (0.3.3-0ubuntu1) raring-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - Avoid an infinite loop in scrolling to the bottom of a
      window. (LP: #959084)
 -- Ken VanDine <email address hidden> Mon, 29 Oct 2012 11:10:44 +0100

Hi! This bug report lacks a clear Test Case and Regression Potential section in the description, which are required by the SRU process. Please add them so we can accept the fix for quantal!

The SRU details appear in comment #22 - I'll put them in the description.

Hello Michael, or anyone else affected,

Accepted adium-theme-ubuntu into quantal-proposed. The package will build now and be available at http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adium-theme-ubuntu/0.3.3-0ubuntu0.1 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please change the bug tag from verification-needed to verification-done. If it does not, change the tag to verification-failed. In either case, details of your testing will help us make a better decision.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance!

I'm afraid I am no longer using Empathy, as this bug was the last straw for a piece of software which didn't have much going for it from the start.

Before: 22528 cmiller 20 0 297m 40m 20m S 9.3 1.4 7:33.21 empathy-chat
After: 7387 cmiller 20 0 290m 43m 28m S 0.0 1.5 0:02.21 empathy-chat

This bug was fixed in the package adium-theme-ubuntu - 0.3.3-0ubuntu0.1

---------------
adium-theme-ubuntu (0.3.3-0ubuntu0.1) quantal-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - Avoid an infinite loop in scrolling to the bottom of a
      window. (LP: #959084)
 -- Ken VanDine <email address hidden> Mon, 29 Oct 2012 11:10:44 +0100

The verification of this Stable Release Update has completed successfully and the package has now been released to -updates. Subsequently, the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team is being unsubscribed and will not receive messages about this bug report. In the event that you encounter a regression using the package from -updates please report a new bug using ubuntu-bug and tag the bug report regression-update so we can easily find any regresssions.

12.04.2 LTS still uses 0.3.2-0ubuntu1, which is affected by this bug? It's possible to push 0.3.3 to SRU for Raring too?