My brave profile is corrupt and wont load any web pages. And hangs the whole computer

[Asinum]

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Description of the issue:
How can this issue be reproduced?

1. Open Brave
2. Whole computer will freeze/hang for 2 minutes or so off and on.
3. Using my main profile no web page will load, will get the spinning wheel in the tab indefinitely. No error screens unless I intervene.

Expected result:
I expect web pages to load fine.

Brave Version( check About Brave):
Version 1.20.110 Chromium: 88.0.4324.192 (Official Build) (x86_64)
*this took 10 mins to get

Additional Information:
Web pages will load, though takes a good while, if I switch to private mode or switch to a guest profile.
I have tried to google this issue no no avail. I have updated to latest build and ‘reset settings’, and restarted the computer, MacOs 10.13.6

Thanks for any help.

[Mattches]

@Asinum,
This is very strange – it’d be one thing to have this behavior happen with a profile that has extensions and lots of browsing data/built up cache. But if you’ve reset your settings I’m hesitant to think that’s the case. I have a few things to test if you’re willing.

First, try disabling Hardware Acceleration and see if this improves performance. You’ll find this in Settings --> Additional Settings --> System --> Hardware Acceleration.
Getting there through the menu may be hard given your situation (as you said it took forever just to get the version number). So if it’s taking forever, you can try launching the browser from the Terminal with Hardware Acceleration disabled by opening your macOS Terminal application and entering the following command:

open -a "Brave browser.app" --args - disable-gpu

Next, I would try creating a new profile and see if performance improves when using this new profile. Again, I recognize it may be difficult to navigate the menu – as an alternative, you can achieve the same thing by doing the following:

1. Close any/all Brave windows.
2. Open Finder on your mac and navigate to ~/Users/[Your user name]/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser
3. Find the Default folder located here – assuming that you haven’t created multiple additional profiles, this folder holds most of your browsing data.
4. If you’d like to keep a safe copy of this data, do so now (copy and save it somewhere else easy to find). Then, delete the Default folder.
5. Now launch Brave. The browser should launch and generate a new default folder.

Now with Brave open and a fresh profile, test and see if performance improves.

Let me know what you find out.

[Asinum]

Thanks for the reply Mattches!
This was the exact info I was looking for. I did the first suggestion, copy/pasted that command in the terminal, it launched Brave, but was still the same issues. Went to settings, and oddly enough GPU was still enabled. I disabled it, and clicked the relaunch button, but still same issue persisted.

I then went to Application Support, took me a sec to remember that MacOS now hides the Library folder but I remembered a quick short cut. I went to copy the ‘default’ folder but it would quickly freeze the whole computer for a few minutes and then Id get this error below.

The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “.com.brave.Browser.ndVrvj” can’t be read or written.
(Error code -36)

I tried to locate this item through the whole default folder but couldn’t find it and finder/spotlight searches couldn’t find it either. And then feeling like an idiot I remembered this would be a hidden file with the “.” in front. Turned off hidden files through the terminal and quickly located it and removed it from the folder. Tried to copy the folder again and got this error.

The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “Cookies” can’t be read or written.
(Error code -36)

Removed ‘Cookies’, duplicated the folder, deleted the original ‘default’ folder, and launched Brave. It quickly launched and every site loads now. I then put the original default folder back but without those 2 ‘corrupt’ files mentioned above and it still works. So looks like those 2 were the culprits.
Also for as long as I can remember, whenever I would need to restore a previous session after my computer would crash(usually about 10 tabs) it would take Brave something like 10 mins to load those pages and then it would be fine. But this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, seems to load pages as fast as Id expect. Hopefully it stays that way.
Thanks again!