Performance has tanked, e.g., 14-second UI latency

[DarkSky]

How can this issue be reproduced?

Open a LOT of tabs. I don’t know how many 'cause Brave can’t tell you how many are open, but nominal CPU utilization runs from 11 to 21% of 2.4GHz 9980HK (sporting 16 HW ‘threads’) so there’s plenty of CPU available, memory utilzation is running about 35% of 128GB so that’s not a constraint, network activity is sparse, disk activity almost non-existent, … not even close to constraints, but Brave’s responsiveness is MUCH WORSE than an 8086 from 1985, with almost any event taking MANY seconds to process, e.g., 14 seconds to get the Brave version information, but please don’t think THAT is what needs to be fixed. EVERY interaction with Brave is taking that long. THAT’s the problem.

Expected result:
Less than one second UI responsiveness.

Brave Version( check About Brave):
Version 1.73.97 Chromium: 131.0.6778.108 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Additional Information:
Suspecting that AntiVirus overhead might be an issue, I uninstalled that stuff prior to posting this topic. When the Task Manager screenshot was taken, VSCode was running three windows (one local, two remote) and Sublime Text had a few files open, so after Win-11 OS overhead, the rest of that memory utilization is due to Brave open tabs/windows, leading me to suspect that whatever supervisory mechanism is responsible for keeping track of open tabs/windows and/or memory has hit the proverbial wall. There’s a design flaw afoot. If we had more insight into what Brave is doing during those lengthy periods of ‘consideration’, we should be able to find the weak link(s) in performance degradation with many windows/tabs to manage. Is the data structure that manages such stuff greater than O(n log n)? That’s where we need to look.

[289wk]

In a Brave Browser New Window, go to:

brave://settings/system

Scroll down to “Performance” > “Memory Saver”:

“Brave frees up memory from inactive tabs. This gives active tabs and other apps more computer resources and keeps Brave fast. Your inactive tabs automatically become active again when you go back to them.”

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Compare the Windows OS Task Manager window with the Brave Browser Task Manager window (and, compare the Process ID numbers):

“Extreme Lag and CPU usage - #14 by nqsfpd”

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Windows OS Task Manager example:

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Brave Browser Task Manager example:

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[DarkSky]

1. I don’t understand how the memory setting would drive enormous latency. The machine has 93GB of free RAM. Is Brave managing it’s own memory - maybe not as scalable as it could be in that respect (e.g. a linked-list is fast at small scale, but turns into quite a nightmare at large scale)?

2. Brave’s Memory Saver was already enabled, set to recommended balanced.

3. Brave’s task manager is too high level to provide insight into where it’s going into the weeds.

4. Ordering Brave’s tasks by CPU utilization, there are about a dozen tabs that pull more CPU than the currently paused YouTube video. That seems wrong. In the following screenshot, ALL of the tabs above the Lexus LFA tab are pulling more CPU and the Lexus LFA tab is the most recently active (besides this one that I’m typing in). Why are all those tabs getting CPU with no cursor traversing, no videos playing, no audio, …?
   

   

5. I’d like the ability to click on a (high CPU) Brave task and tell it to suspend - even better if I could select a range of top CPU Brave tasks and SUSPEND (not KILL) them all at once.

[289wk]

Upon Launching Brave: NO INTERNET

Brave Browser is a Chromium engine’d web browser. Same for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. The Chromium Projects - Memory Usage Backgrounder “https://www.chromium.org/developers/memory-usage-backgrounder/” Multi-Process Model Background To understand Chromium’s memory usage, let’s understand the multi-process model. Unlike other browsers, Chromium is divided into multiple processes. When Chromium starts up, it will initially have two processes. One process is the browser process which c…

[DarkSky]

Lots of information on the Chromium memory model, but (in my case) memory isn’t the issue. The problem is (what should be inactive) tabs chewing up CPU needlessly.

I found that Claude.ai is a big CPU hog - I killed the process (and it’s ~10 subprocesses) and quiescent CPU use dropped from 25-34% to 9-12%. We’ll see how much that impacts Brave latency.