Scrollback of large buffered chat rooms is slow

[n2185x@…]

This has been a longstanding bug, and may be beyond the abilities of the developers to fix (since it may be a defect of the underlying toolkit).

My usage of Colloquy (and, indeed, any IRC program) may be unusual. I join a chat room at work and remain connected for weeks to months at a time. I do not clear my scrollback history because I find it useful to be able to go back and examine previously sent messages, and find it more convenient to do so by simply scrolling back than by examining a saved history.

The end result, however, is that scrollback (particularly with the mouse wheel) will get slower as the amount of text saved in the scrollback buffer increases.

While one might think that this is something that would naturally arise in any IRC client, Pidgin is an existence proof that this needn't be the case -- its scrollback is fast regardless of the amount of text in the scrollback buffer.

And so, I have to request that this issue be fixed, if possible, since I think the usability (for me) of Colloquy would be markedly improved as a result.

Note that I do consider this to be a defect, even if most would regard it as being a minor one. For me it has a noticeable impact on the usability of the program.

[zach]

Colloquy differs from Pidgin (and pretty much every other client around) in how it displays text. Colloquy uses a webview to render all its text, so it looks nice and pretty for you.

Most clients have a plain text box. Because of this, having thousands and thousands of lines of scrollback in Colloquy is analogous to having a bunch of huge websites opened in Safari or Firefox. It will, unfortunately, eat up a lot of memory and cause things to slow down. Short of redesigning Colloquy to work differently (and lose a big feature, styling), theres not much that can be done to fix this.

Having more ram would help though :p