So when I launched brave today I noticed that it sucked up around 18 gb of ram. I tried restarting pc, turning off hardware acceleration, clearing out cache but nothing really worked. After I started up the browser memory just started growing and growing, looks like a memory leak.
Here is a screenshot of what it looks like in the task manager. I have only 1 extension enabled and that is dark reader. Have been using it for quite a while and never had problems with it, just thought about it though in the middle of writing this so I am going to try without the extension and if it works I guess I’ll delete the post. If I haven’t deleted the post well memory usage is still astronomical.
Your screenshot is useless, don’t use Windows task manager, only Edge works with it.
You need to use Chromium/Brave internal one with Shift+Esc or Menu → More tools or right clicking empty space in the toolbar.
Only because you are running one extension, doesn’t mean it is not causing issues.
You could have easily seen which tab or extension or what is using the 9GB of memory RAM, which is my opinion it is still okay because you are at 70%, and memory is meant to be used and filled, as long as it doesn’t start writing to disk for lack of memory, what issue is there to use the memory? why do you have 24GB of memory, if you don’t want to use it? I mean, you could open your computer, take memory out, have only 8GB or something and then that way reduce memory usage, by not having too much RAM.
About the CPU, Why did you turn off Hardware Acceleration? Obviously you will use more CPU because your GPU will not be used to render stuff anymore, GPU has more cores than CPU, that’s why it’s been used, have you ever seen the difference between encoding a video with GPU vs CPU? or a 3D renderer? well, it is a lot, of course there are downsides about GPU acceleration in large 3D renderers but that’s beyond the subject.
Clearing Cache will not do anything, but make you just re-download the files and add them to the Memory RAM or disk, and will not fix any CPU or Memory issue.
Anyway without using Brave/Chromium task manager you will not be able to troubleshoot this.
Anyway, did you disable Dark Reader and tested it again? That should have been the first step, in my opinion dark reader is not even needed, and you should actually understand it can cause many issues because it injects and modifies EVERY single page.
Brave/Chromium already has an automatic dark mode, it either, applies dark mode when a page doesn’t have it or uses the native Dark mode present in a page.
Adblocker can be used to control it, which I have explained many times in this forum, by using :style()
you pretty much emulate what is said in that blog, you use example.com##:root:style(color-scheme: only light !important;) to remove it per page
or example.com##ccsSelector:style(color-scheme: only light !important;) which will remove the effect per element.
And you can inject more things, like a white background if it is needed like I did in this page that generated QR codes but the QR code has transparent background so you force only this element to get the background color that will not get affected by the auto dark mode.
qifi.org###qrcode:style(color-scheme: light only !important; background-color: #fff !important;)
Or sometimes you have to manually fix it like lowes.com##img:style(mix-blend-mode: unset !important;) where some property like mix-blend-mode is not compatible with the autodark mode.
Dark Reader will override every single page even if they have already a dark mode implement, also, these fixes has to be rarely used, I use Auto Dark mode and I rarely fix pages.
But this way you avoid using an extension, at least you can use it to test the browser without Dark reader.
For example, dark reader extension was messing with the Adblocker Element picker, few months ago, when it got fixed it broke he Picker with the native Auto Dark mode. And you can see examples of so many extensions breaking the browser and causing high CPU usage.
brave://flags/#enable-force-dark and I use CIELAB or Selective Inversion of non-image elements, they seem to do the same exact job, but you can test the others as well. CIELAB just seems to be closer to most ‘native’ pages Dark mode compared with the other modes.
Did not know about the browser task manager. I just looked into it and turns out Instagram was eating 10 gigabytes of ram. And also about what you said using the computers resources well yes, that’s fair but first of all brave never really used more than 2 gb ram and 2% cpu usage. That’s quite a spike of 16 gb of ram and I’ll check out the brave dark mode
Edit: I am pretty horrible with CSS as I have just about never written in it. Where exactly do I have to enable Emulate auto dark mode, if I do it in dev tools when I close them it just gets ticked back off. Again sorry for my keen stupidity when it comes to this but oh well. And as to why instagram was eating 10 gb of ram I am pretty curios so if you have any idea that would also be lovely.
