Using Pidgin 2.4.3 on an updated system it quits suddenly from time to
time. Investigating by running "pidgin -d" I found that it attempts to
allocate a huge amount of memory which is, of course, denied and then it
quits. Investigating a little further I found the pattern: whenever
pidgin tried to open a new httpcon for an specific contact of mine --
maybe because the contact attempted to talk to me or to retrieve my
picture or changed the nick... i'm not sure. To add: I'm using the MSN
protocol.

In short: this bug is hard to track because it depends on contact
behaviour but it turns out to make pidgin useless since I cannot
establish a serious conversation with no one.

I see two problems:

  1) The main bug, of course: pidgin should not try to allocate, for any 
reason, that huge amount of memory (about 100 gigabytes or so)
  2) The behavior when pidgin cannot allocate memory shouldn't be to simply 
quit. I'd suggest that only the operation that demanded that memory gets 
aborted, not the whole application. That way hopefully pidgin could stay 
running and, possibly, without even the user noticing that something went wrong.

and... if you allow me:

  3) If one would attempt to make pidgin rock solid i'd suggest that it
never discards a message: if the application quits (or gets killed)
before the user can read the message, when started over again the unseen
messages should be shown.

-- 
pidgin crashed with signal 5 in g_logv()
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/123386
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