Brave has become very sluggish lately

Brave browser has become very sluggish lately

Simply browse the web

Sites like YouTube and Amazon exhibit this problem readily for me. Videos in general seem problematic in that I can click on them to stop and it’ll take between 3-5 seconds before the video stops. Maximizing a video maximizes the window but the video is only in the upper left corner. After about 5 seconds it becomes full screen though.

Actual Result:

Sluggish performance

Expected result:

Zippy performance

Reproduces how often:

All the time

Operating System and Brave Version:

Ubuntu 21.10
Brave Version: Version 1.38.71 Chromium: 100.0.4896.46

Additional Information:

No sluggishness in Chrome Version 100.0.4896.60

Yeah True , even chromium runs smoother on same system

But it shouldn’t be. If I open a private window I don’t have the problem. If I turn off all extensions I don’t have a problem. Adding them back and trying to see which one may be causing the problem has been inconclusive so far. If this keeps up I’ll have to go back to Chrome.

Try clearing the cache in brave://settings/clearBrowserData and then restart Brave.

Same issue here on Youtube/Twitch, clearing cache doesn’t help. “Browsing as a guest” either (so kind of a fresh profile).

Someone on reddit mentioning same thing on Twitch.tv : https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/tsrmit/ui_laggy_on_twitchtv_after_recent_update/

Could affect anything heavy on GPU utilization ? (disabling Hardware acceleration didn’t help).

Tried clearing the cache, didn’t help. Heavy GPU utilization is interesting as I have been running intense processes using my GPUs to compress my video files except 1) stopping them doesn’t make Brave faster and leaving them running doesn’t make Chrome or other browsers slow (and as we know Brave is derived from Chrome) now does Brave slow down in a private window either.

I’ve noticed this too on Windows 10 PC. The same symptoms as the OP, and also like the OP no problems on Chrome. So, for the moment on PC at least, I’m switching to Crome.

I’ve been having the same problem for a while and have tried everything without any success. There are a bunch of other posts describing similar problems using slightly different language (eg. slow, freezing, long latency).

This posts describes all the things I’ve tried, maybe one of them will help you.
Brave Periodically Slow

Same issue here (already reinstalled brave)
I already use chrome for youtube since 2 weeks

I hope we find a fix because I realy like brave!

Brave on the Left. Safari on the Right.
This lasted for about 4 minutes and then Brave started working normally again. This happens preiodically through out the day. Seems like it happens more when I’m watching videos, but not always.

Tried everything as well. Brave browser is very sluggish compared to any other browser.

Also the Brave native search is really lagging and often times doesn’t even complete the search. Google on the other hand is blazing fast.

This is also happening at my office as well. Clearly a Brave issue.

Uninstall brave = fix?
Does the devs read this topic?

So I think I have a new clue. I noticed the last couple times that Brave got slow, the SSD drive that Brave is installed started having very slow write speeds. I have other apps on the same SSD and I don’t see slow down from those apps, but they generally aren’t writing a lot of data to the SSD.

I read that SSD drives can have slow write speeds if you overload the SSD’s write cache. They say you would need to write 50GB all at once to overload it. Even if I’m watching a video, it’s not gonna be 50GB. So I’m wondering if Brave is doing something where it periodically tries to write a ton of data?

I’m 83% sure that Brave is doing something that my SSD doesn’t like. Here’s what I know:

  1. My SSD works fine when Brave is not running.
  2. When Brave is running, my SSD periodically becomes unusable.
  3. The only thing the SSD manufacture says could cause this if I’m writing very large amounts (50GB) of data (another cause is low disk space, but I don’t have that).

Others have reported similar issues in the past:

I solved my problem by reformatting my SSD. This is very strange since I had 475GB free on a 500GB SSD and would not think with that much free space a reformat would be needed.

Brave is mostly the only thing I use on this SSD, so I think there’s something about Brave that caused the need for me to reformat my SSD. I notice that clearing my cache in Brave only lasts for few hours before it’s at the maximum of 1.8GB again. I’m not watching videos or playing games, so I don’t know how I can accumulate 1.8GB (my cache limit) so quickly.

Is there a way to reduce the amount of data cached? I’m wondering if it’s caching ads and a bunch of stuff I don’t need.

We use the same methods of storing data as Chrome, no changes directly there. Unsure what would cause the issue. But clearing the cache occasionally shouldn’t do any harm.

But why does my cache fill up to 1.8GB so quickly? I don’t watch a lot of videos, but when I do, after about 15 - 30 minutes, the cache is full. Is Brave caching the entire video? Are video ads from websites cached too?

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