Recent document history is slowing down ubuntu applications.

On one of my machine I have installed Ubuntu gutsy, which is running for more than 6 months. Recently I have noticed slowdown of my Ubuntu machine. I though it was some hardware malfunction or something, tried to tune hardisk settings etc..., But I wasn't able to resolve performance issue. Recently when I was searching for a solution I found that the culprit is Recently opened documents history in gnome. Gnome maintains two files called ~/.recently-used , ~/.recently-used.xbel. Where .recently-used.xbel is the xml file. The problem is if you don't clear this history it will slow down your system because some applications like eog will parse these files before starting. I don't know whether its good choice to use xml file at critical area of system to collect data, instead you could have used sqlite or some thing like that to speed up lookups. Please resolve this bug as these kind of bugs are difficult to pin point.