Why is Skype memory usage so high?

According to TaskManager on W7, Skype is using 72Mb of memory. I'm not in a call or anything - it's just logged in.

Is this anything to care about?

I've found two things to have helped lower the unreasonable, and inefficient memory usage of Skype:

• Turn off emoticon animations (or emoticons altogether)
  • Options > IM > Turn off emoticon animations
• Display only contact names without pictures
  • Options > Contacts List > Contact name only

My Skype–running on a corporate computer for company use–consistently uses >500MB of physical memory, this being the base value with no message threads actually open. When I have several threads open, with a long history in each, it can increase by 200MB easily.

Most of this memory usage seems to be due to the long (corporate) contact lists and Skype buffering of the conversation history, profile images, and active threads, but that's just a guess.

No, it isn't. This is a perfectly normal value. Unless a program is not meticulously optimized for memory usage, that is.

Skype will be creating resources for every profile in your contact list (photos especially can eat up ram), your own profile and any history about that it keeps, creating buffers for handling connections, buffers for histories of conversations, etc.

The exe is 20 meg alone, and generally a lot of memory systems in there will need to allocate some basic workspace once they initialise, even if that subsystem isn't getting used.

Looking at it, I'd say its using more than it needs but not enough that they wanted to waste time optimising for memory usage.

EDIT - Also, if its creating a lot of windows and user interfaces that are just hidden, that can escalate the memory usage dramatically. Skype has a LOT of functionality your probably not accessing.

The problem is that Skype is using P2P connection typology, hence the application needs to use some users as relay nodes or super nodes to host the connections between other users. This issue happens when your computer is so powerful that the program chooses you to host the connections.

To solve this issue, all what you have to do is delete the routing table file to renew it. You can do that in Windows, as follows:

• Quit Skype entirely. You can do that by right clicking the Skype icon in the system tray next to the clock (bottom right of your screen), then select Quit.
• Press on your keyboard Windows button plus R.
• Type in the run box C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Skype
• Delete the file shared or shared.xml, not shared.lck
• Start Skype again.

In a Mac, you can delete the same file as follows:

• Quit Skype. Right click Skype in the Dock, then choose Quit.
• Go to home > Library > Application support > Skype.
• Delete the shared.xml file.