Brave freezing repeatedly during use

[rogerco]

Description of the issue:*
Brave repeatedly freezes for about 5-10 seconds every 20 secs or so during use. A nightmare when typing stuff (like now), no obvious trigger - seems like something in the background is hogging it.

Firefox works normally as do all other applications and functions. No obvious signs of problem in System Monitor except one CPU is hitting 100% load every 20 secs or so.

On another (desktop) machine running same system software, same version of brave with same extensions and same updates all is normal. This one (a laptop) is the one most used for browsing.

The problem started about a week ago - no obvious correlation with changes/updates to the machine. Since then Brave has updated to latest version but no improvement.

How can this issue be reproduced?

1. Install Brave, use for daily for six months

Expected result:
Normal responsive action

Brave Version( check About Brave):

Version 1.17.75 Chromium: 87.0.4280.88 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Additional Information:
Ubuntu 20.04

I really don’t want to have to switch back to Firefox, and I also don’t want to uninstall and reinstall as I’ll loose all my settings, history etc.
I’m not (AFAIK) using any sync apart from a Floccus Nextcloud bookmarks extension, but this is also installed on the other machine and is working fine in itself on both.

I note that history has a ridiculous number of items in it - it seems that it never prunes itself - is that right? Surely there must be a way of only keeping history for a month, but the only options seem to be to delete items from the last hour/day/week/month/ever rather than to keep items for a week or a month.
I find history very useful, but could do with only having a months worth. But surely the size of the history can’t be causing these repeated freezes? Any suggestions, anyone else got the same problem?

[Mattches]

Can you try disabling Hardware Acceleration in settings to see if this resolves the issue?

You’ll find this in Settings --> Additional Settings --> System --> Hardware Acceleration

[rogerco]

Interesting - at first it seemed to help, but that was just because Brave was restarting.
After an initial burst of activity when Brave starts and is restoring tabs cpu use stabilises, but after about 60 secs suddenly, without doing anything, load on at least one cpu rises to 100%. If I switch to another tab and start doing something there then more cores get used until ultimately Brave is hogging all four cores.
Screenshots showing activity monitor.
1 background level without Brave running (no other apps loaded just background processes)

2 the 60 secs when Brave loads, restores tabs and stabilises

3 the 60 secs after opening a new tab

4. 60 secs whilst typing this post

Interestingly when Brave is closed load continues at 100% on at least one core for about 50secs, then drops away. Same happens if Brave is put into background, after a minute it stops doing stuff and the machine becomes usable normally.

[Mattches]

@rogerco,
Thanks for all the information.
This makes me think it may be one of the extensions you have installed causing the issue. Can you try temporarily disabling them and see if performance improves? Alternatively, you can test by creating a new browser profile (Menu --> Create new profile) and try browsing with that new profile (as it is created without any data or extensions) and see if performance improves.

Note that if you do try this, ensure you close any windows running with your current profile (that is seeing the performance issues).

[rogerco]

Thank you @Mattches. It turns out that it is Floccus Nextcloud Bookmark Sync extension (v4.3.0) that is the problem. I had foolishly assumed that because an identical setup (same extensions, same OS etc) was working fine it probably wasn’t an extension.

The odd thing is that Floccus had been installed for about the same amount of time on both machines, although this one is more used. Possibly a problem due to the size of the log file or number of bookmarks (about 2000 bookmarks and the logfile over 300Mb here). I can’t find where floccus is storing its log in order to clear it - where do extensions put their data?

Anyway, very sorry for the false alarm, shame about Floccus because it is very very useful for keeping your bookmarks on private secure storage. Need to find an alternative independent solution for now.