Severe slow-down problems with February 14 Google homepage
On February 14, Google home page ( https://www.google.com.au ) with its Valentine/Olympic doodle in place of the standard logo caused severe a slow-down, and even stuttering suspension of all applications on the computer.
I found that by avoiding that specific page that day, Firefox (current, update applied yesterday) ran as expected, and previous and today's Google homepage is not appearing to cause any problem. The doodle was animated, so I can only guess the animation method was causing the issue.
All Replies (4)
It could be site related as some sites on certain days get more traffic then others and that can cause congestion. And leads to a secondary effect as your computer is waiting for the data to get through it takes up RAM and any other software running has to wait it's turn leading to slowdown on your side. So low RAM and slow CPU can be a negative effect in return if the site is slow to respond back which compounds the wait time.
Well, according to Firefox, the page had completed its load, and the issue seemed to be related to the running of the page code. From what little information I could get from the task manager, the RAM demand didn't seem excessive, and neither did the CPU, but the stuttering behaviour looked like CPU demand spikes, faster than could be recorded by the task manager.
All I could see were secondary effects like a secondary App stopping at rapid intervals, and the mouse pointer moving in a jerky manner.
I know my computer is a few years old now, but the specs aren't too ancient; Intel i5-2400S @ 2.5GHz (4 core) with 6GB RAM Win 7 Home 64-bit.
Given that there were no problems aside from the one page for the entire day. And any time I went to that specific page during the day at a few different times during the day, the same effect appeared, until I left the page, it seemed like that page was issue.
I have the same problem. When I go to the Task Manager, the GPU process shows 99% usage and that happens only with this specific Doodle. In Chrome, Edge and Opera, this problem does not exist, so I think the cause is in Firefox. The problem is resolved by disabling hardware acceleration, but the performance of Firefox is greatly affected.
PD: My graphic drivers are updated.
MiguelSC said
problem is resolved by disabling hardware acceleration, but the performance of Firefox is greatly affected.
I tried this solution myself. I noticed that today's Google homepage Doodle was also causing the issue, but to an apparent lesser degree. So I went to the Doodle archive and tried Feb 14 with Hardware acceleration off, and it, like today's, ran quite smoothly with H/W Accel off.
The widget sitting on my screen to report CPU usage shows a higher value than normal, about an extra 20%, but no lags / CPU spikes.
It's a good tip Miguel. I may even leave H/W accel off for now and see how things go. But it looks like an issue the Mozilla team could look into.