One of the things I’ve hated about AIM 6.0 is the fact it’s very sluggish and I think I’ve found the cause of that problem. By default, if you enable logging, AIM will display your previous chats inside that window. Although they don’t show you the entire log, they do show you a good week’s worth. I mean when I hit CTRL+A, CTRL+C (select all and copy), it froze my IM windows for about 10 seconds, trying to copy the chat into my clipboard. Of course this was with someone I’ve chatted with quite often.
So the 1st problem lies in the fact there’s 1+ week worth of logs being displayed into your AIM window, but the bigger problem lies in the fact each buddy has only one log file. Right now my log file with RayAlome is at 677KB and that’s logging from Jan. 4th, 2007 (when I installed AIM 6.0 on this machine). Each time I double click RayAlome’s screenname on my AIM buddy list, it opens that file and tries to parse out 1+ weeks worth, causing a major delay in trying to chat with him. Since this log is loaded into memory, subsequent visits to this IM window has to bring all that back up. What’s worse is if I close the window, opening another chat session with him again will result in reparsing the log file.
Imagine this log file continue to grow. In a year, I’d have 4meg log file loaded and parsed every time I try to chat with RayAlome.
The trick is then to disable the loading of the log when you want to chat with someone. If you really want to see what you guys last chatted about, you can always click People > Show Logs or just right click their screenname and click Show Logs. To disable the loading of the log file when you open a chat window, hit F7 for settings (or Edit > Settings…). Inside the General IM section, uncheck the box that says: Keep IM conversation text after IM is closed.
That’s it. My AIM window now loads up immediately when I double click someone’s nick. Hope this helps!