So this is a bit of a chaser to the old site responsiveness thread. I’ve noticed that the javascript stuff (?) that the main site uses is either leaking or something weird is going on because the tabs never stop growing in RAM footprint and the CPU cost, while it can drop down, never actually behaves like most article sites (drop below 2% CPU use and never jump back up again once the page has done the main loading/rendering).
I generally open a few tabs and then read through them, open a few more tabs and read through. Basically the WP site makes this impossible as the browser becomes unresponsive under the load of more than a couple of WP tabs open at once (and cannot even be left to settle down once loaded as they never finish actively eating resources both CPU time and more RAM). It makes me turn to reading articles via my RSS feed (which doesn’t have these issues but, for the longevity of the site, also doesn’t seem to have any ads so means you don’t get revenue/clicks - this would seem less than ideal for everyone).
A couple of minutes later (again, the CPU use is spikey, not constant, but never seems to drop below 4% and spikes up high):
This is latest Chrome stable x64 on Windows 10 (latest update). [Having just finished writing this, Wire Wood… is now at 770 MB and rising, holding 7-15% CPU use]
If this isn’t an ad thing though, I think the company behind the Vice News website (and by extension, I assume, Waypoint) is Postlight. I’m a fan of Paul Ford so I’ve followed the company and they do neat work, and are really approachable (I even wrote in to their podcast a few times) so it’d be totally worth raising this with them! Paul Ford or Gina Trapani are probably the people to @ on twitter.
Some quick testing on my laptop suggests it’s the adverts.
With uBlock origin turned on, the page sits at 0% CPU and a constant ram level if I just leave it. However, with ads enabled, I’m also getting that constant CPU usage, ~1KB/s of network traffic and a wavering (up and down) RAM usage.
Everyone should run ad blockers all the time. The sort of executable code based ads delivered by algorithmic ad networks are frequently crap in the way described here, and they’re a major vector for malware too. We’ve even seen ads run in-browser bitcoin mining code. An adblocker is as important, and just as much a piece of security software, as anti-virus is. Don’t run without it.
There are decent ways to pay for content online, and some of those might even involve advertising, but the cost of modern web ads is not that you see adverts, it’s that sites hand their access to your computer over to the highest bidder and feed you stuff they’ve never even seen, much less vetted. That’s just not acceptable, and you should not accept it.
I’ve definitely also been having the issue, and it definitely clashes with how I use the internet (open a bunch of stuff up and chug through it throughout the day). I think it’s definitely a cross-Vice thing though.
I noticed this issue as well and ended up turning on my adblocker again. Really wish WayPoint had a subscription service like Giant Bomb so I didn’t have to worry about this
