It's not the history that causes the slowdown. I like the history myself. Very useful feature. But the history is only being written to as you chat with someone. If you have a really huge log for a particular contact then it can slow down things a bit , but only when you chat with that person.
What causes the slowdown is the size of your contact list. The more people you have on the list the more time icq has to spend on checking who is online/offline, etc. It takes more cpu and more memory to do it.
Unfortunately the only thing you can do to speed it up is to dump as many contacts as possible.
A really useful feature would be a way to sort your contact list and see which ones you haven't talked to in the last 3 months or whatever.
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