Description of the issue:
I am currently using Brave Version 1.75.178 Chromium: 133.0.6943.98 (Official Build) (64-bit). My current Windows version is 64-bit Windows 10 Pro 22H2 OS Build 19045.5247. The specs of the workstation that I am running it on should hopefully be sufficiently beefy-- an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor with 64GB of RAM and an Nvidia RTX3070 GPU. I currently run Brave with 4-open Brave browser windows and a healthy amount of tabs in each. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is around 300-tabs in all, though I haven’t taken a count. Before my Brave installation updated to version 1.75.175 it ran in a respectfully useable fashion under that tab and window load, taking maybe about 45-seconds to initially start up and with a very slight pause when switching between windows, especially if the window being switched to had a YouTube video playing in its active tab, but nothing really to complain about. I was able to go about my daily workflow with Brave being sufficiently performant and reliable as I went through my workday.
After the update to 1.75.175 however, the difference was night-and-day: With the same setup as described above, Brave now takes over 5-minutes to open, and even then it is in a poorly-working state, which much lag, freezing, and instability. Once it finally gets going I can switch from tab-to-tab in the same Brave browser window without too much delay, but if I click on one of the other open Brave windows to bring it to the foreground as the active window all of the Brave windows completely freeze and stop responding, often for as long as 3-minutes or so, before the focus switch finally happens. Looking at Windows Task Manager while this is happening, it increases the processor usage from around my 1-2% idle usage to 6-7% usage. Drilling down further, that usage is constrained to 4-logical cores out of the processor’s 24, making those 4-cores have high-utilization, but not any of the 20-other logical cores on the Ryzen 5900X CPU. RAM usage by Brave, even after Brave has been open for a while, always stays well below 5GB in total, and is often below 3GB. When the freezing happens, Windows Task Manager shows that the Brave process that is using the most RAM out of the Brave processes goes to “Not Responding” status, but the other running Brave processes don’t. This “Not Responding” status in that one process ends once the window that is being brought into foreground focus finally unfreezes and does. I cannot look at the built-in Brave Task Manager while this is going on because all Brave windows during these window focus switches become frozen.
This issue has made using Brave with multiple browser windows open completely unusable-- every time I try to switch between Brave browser windows there is a multiple-minute freeze before it finally happens. There is also a freeze when I switch between a non-Brave window that is in focus to a out-of-focus window, e.g. having a Notepad window in front and then clicking on a Brave window behind it. Switching focus between two non-Brave windows has no lag or freezing, and is as snappy has it always was, so the problem definitely seems to be tied to Brave.
This issue gets worse over time the longer that Brave is running, with the delays getting longer and longer until finally Brave stays in “Not Responding” status for so long that I have to kill Brave in Windows Task Manager and restart it, once again waiting ~5+ minutes for the restart to happen and restore all of my tabs. Brave can become bad enough to have be to killed by Windows Task Manger after only a few hours of running. Trying to click on a tab with the mouse and move it to a new position in the tab bar causes extreme lag and unresponsiveness as well. When Brave auto updated from 1.75.175 to 1.75.178 the described issues all got very noticeably worse with the lag times between Brave windows focus switches, minimizing, and maximizing increasing to often several minutes each. Things have gotten so bad that I am on the verge of ditching Brave altogether and finding a new browser, which is a shame since I have been a Brave fan and user for several years.
I have attempted several attempts to speed up Brave and make it usable again, including:
- Disabling extensions
- Turning off hardware acceleration
- Trying every memory saver setting including turning it off completely
Doing these things seemed to increase the stability of Brave a tiny bit, i.e. make it take longer until the length of the freezes become so unbearable that I have to kill Brave with Windows Task Manager, but nothing has helped stop it from freezing during every Brave browser window minimize, maximize, and focus switch action. (This is one of those times where I wish that there was an easy built-in way to rollback to a previous version of Brave.)
Brave Version( check About Brave):
Brave Version 1.75.178 Chromium: 133.0.6943.98 (Official Build) (64-bit).
Thank you in advance for any work done to investigate and fix this issue for the next Brave official release.