High Memory/CPU Usage with AdBlock Disabled

[Penny_1]

Hi Devs of WindowsCentral,

Sorry I don't have the opportunity to record a video on Loom per your requested bug filing protocol, but I'm on a work laptop and it is impractical. Anyway, I did want to bring this to your attention, so I'll offer a description and a couple of screenshots. Hopefully should be easy enough to re-create.

Description
Recently noticed that Windows Central has been especially slow as of late. Page load times, comment loading, and can even hear my laptop's CPU fan spin up. So I decided to open the Task Manager for Chrome on Mac (Chrome has its own Task Manager), and lo and behold, the Windows Central tab is running at over 800MB of memory usage with extremely high CPU usage as well. This is with AdBlock Plus turned off for the site. Here's a screenshot:


After a page refresh, I saw the memory usage continue to rise above 1.1GB. I decided to turn on AdBlock Plus to see what effect that would have. After enabling AdBlock plus and navigating to a couple of different pages within the site (main news feed, then back to the forum thread), memory usage was down to a much more reasonable ~500MB (still a little high) and CPU usage was down as well. Here's a screenshot of that:


Bottom line, it looks like the integrations for your ad publishers and advertisements in general are really bogging the site down. Turning on AdBlock Plus and letting the browser GC made too big of an impact to dismiss.

Steps to Re-create

1. Navigate to Windows Central | News, Forums, Reviews, Help for Windows Phone
2. Turn off AdBlock Plus (or other ad blocker)
3. Open up Google Chrome's Task Manager
4. Refresh browser
5. Observe high memory/cpu usage
6. Re-enable AdBlock Plus for this site
7. Refresh page or navigate to a couple different pages within site
8. Observe memory/cpu usage now in the Chrome Task Manager

Relevant Details

• Running Mac OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite)
• Running Chrome Version 54.0.2840.98 on Mac
• AdBlock Plus disabled at start of test, then enabled for second step
• Dev console did show JS errors even with AdBlock Plus disabled

 

[holdum333]

Thanks for your reply! I don't see this using Firefox browser. I don't see any difference with uBlock on or off!

 

[libra89]

I don't know how it works for Mac but for Chrome on a PC, I run both AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin together and I have noticed a difference there.

 

[Penny_1]

Just wanted to update this:

I tried windowscentral.com again last night from my home computer, so running Chrome 55.xx on Windows 10. I did not have memory issues there, with AdBlock turned On or Off. Did not test in any other browsers on Windows.

Back on my Mac at work today, I quit out of Chrome and let it update to version 55.xx (was on 54.xx previously). I tried the same thing again, windowscentral.com with AdBlock On and Off. With AdBlock On, memory usage is less than what I was seeing yesterday, now at about 330MB. However, as soon as I turn the AdBlock Off and refresh, memory usage is jumping back up to 800MB+.

Bottom line, this is looking like an issue with the ads on Chrome for Mac. Hope this helps.

 

[James Falconer]

@Penny_1 - really appreciate the feedback here. I'll get it over to our tech team.

If there is anything we can do to make reporting these issues easier (via our protocol) please let me know. Following that protocol gives our techs a much better chance of discovering and fixing the source issue.

Thanks again!

 

[Penny_1]

@Penny_1 - really appreciate the feedback here. I'll get it over to our tech team.

If there is anything we can do to make reporting these issues easier (via our protocol) please let me know. Following that protocol gives our techs a much better chance of discovering and fixing the source issue.

Thanks again!

No problem -- thank you for accepting bug submissions.

My full time job is currently as a front end developer, so I do understand that half the effort sometimes goes into re-creating the bug. That being said, it is hard to strike a balance between getting enough information to re-create the bug, and asking the user to do too much. In my opinion, and please don't take this as a slight, is that your current process may be erring on the side of asking users to do too much.

It may not be possible depending on team size and finances, but that's usually where dedicated QA staff turns out to be very important. If you can ask the user for basic steps to create the issue, then have QA test and enumerate the exact steps to re-create consistently, you leave the developers with less guesswork. I just find this to be the most efficient process I've worked with.