Description of the issue:
Sometimes the scrolling in Brave Browser becomes choppy, so that if you scroll fast, you can see the website rendered by grey squares, even on old nearly completely plain text websites, with very high cpu load, like 80-100% instead of the regular 10-20% “Modern” websites like youtube become nearly unusable with reaction times in seconds if a video is loaded. Or just entering text on this website brave community website causes a full CPU load. Often this state goes away after a couple of minutes, sometimes it takes much longer
How can this issue be reproduced?
Unfortunately, even after a full year with this issue, I could not fully identify the trigger of mysterious condition. But it most often starts if I use heavy websites like Twitter or youtube.
My gut reaction is that it could be related to my hardware/gpu configuration. I use a old Intel 2520m processor with HD3000 onboard graphics and Windows 10 20H2 and a high WQHD resolution.
There are no “official” drivers for Windows 10 anymore. At a low resolution, the CPU load is reduced and the problem might get unnoticed. Is it possible, that hardware acceleration fails intermittently? How could one check that? Is the root cause the driver or brave/chromium or something completely differently? I really have no idea.
I appreciate any help!
Expected result:
Smooth scrolling, low cpu loads, all the time
Adjusting Hardware Acceleration via brave://settings/system, might help here. CPU/GPU Performance might still be a struggle given the age of the hardware. @PanAM747
I tried switching off Hardware Acceleration completely, and indeed performance is not so great then.
But if the acceleration works, it is totally sufficient like 8 years ago when I bought the computer. So if it works sometimes, why not all the time? I have not lost all hope yet…
Hey, the case of windows getting slower over time, why it feels faster to reinstall and start from scratch. I can’t say 100% it would fix this issue, but any number of things that could affect it over time. Maybe try a clean install of Brave?
I would look at Task manager/More Tools within Brave. See how CPU/GPU usage compares per tab
Ok I admit it, my Windows 10 intstall is an upgrade of my 7 installation that I used for 8 years where I imported some settings from my desktop.
That withstanding, can that really be the issue here? I mean it is not your typical bloat I guess but a night and day difference.
I have checked the Brave internal taskmanager also. Unfortunately it shows me no more than that my active tab is causing very high CPU loads.
If I check my GPU loads with GPU-Z they also spike enormously in this strange “lag” state.
Are there some more sophisticated diagnostic options? I mean I would be so happy to just know if the fault lies within Windows or the Browser…
Regarding reinstall of Brave: No I have not done it. But what I didnt mention yet: Other chromium based browsers like Edge or Opera have the same issue. And I got the new Edge Browser just a couple of weeks ago so it should be reasonably “clean”. Even Firefox has it…
So just some brief update: As this is nagging me so much, I actually did a parallel clean install of Windows 7. Unfortunately, after about an hour of operation, the same problem appears. So I guess neither Windows 10 nor the age of my installation are at fault.
After that, I actually tried firefox undisturbed from a Chromium based Browser, only some Electron Apps running in parallel maybe. Though it still has different “states” and youtube has sometimes just been at 100% even with h264 at 480p, so far it was way smoother now running independantly. For me a little bit notorious WebGL based online-boardgame colonist.io also consumes only half as much cpu with a running animation. After that I did a cross check with Microsoft Edge. Problem reappears instantly.
So my guess is there is something wrong within Chromium? I recorded a trace of a website loading and scrolling in Brave. Would that help anybody here or should I try my luck with a bugreport at Chromium?
I would really like to be able to switch back to Brave as a appreciate your mission and founder…
Thanks very much.
@PanAM747,
You might also open a Github issue with your findings on our Brave Browser repository. That way devs can review it. We have some information on this issue captured on our wiki already:
Feel free to reference this thread and/or me (@mattches) in the issue.
