Neowin main page uses over 1.5 GB of ram, why?

[Nexus1974]

I'm using Chrome and have been for years but when loading the main page on Neowin I have noticed it is really slow to render recently.

 

It is the most memory intensive website of all the sites that I visit. 

 

Chrome is showing that it is using over 1.5GB of ram just for the one tab. Is there something up that would be causing this. Anyone else seeing this?

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

Umm, Chrome is known to be heavy on RAM. Maybe you have a lot of cache on the page?

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

Does it make a difference if you browse in incognito/private mode?

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky
 

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

It seems to be a Chrome issue.

I've got the main page open in Chrome and Edge, Edge even has another tab with this thread and manages to use over a gig of ram less:

[Nexus1974]

Using Private mode in Chrome loads a bit quicker.

Was just also building a recovery USB tool which has Chrome in it and trying Neowin.net crashes Chrome as it run out of ram, trying BBC News works fine (which is quite graphically heavy)

It may be a Chrome issue but looks more to be a Neowin site issue as is using the most ram of any site I visit and this is just loading the default home page

My main PC has 64 GB of ram so not an issue, its just an issue in the recovery tool but every other site was fine that I tested it with.

[+thexfile Subscriber²]

It's multiple processes that are added up for that 1500.  That's page caching.

[harvaparva]

Chrome keeps each process independent from each other, so if one crashes is doesn't take the other one down as well.

So your looking at the total RAM for the whole of Chrome instead of each process, tab and Chrome extension.

If you turn off each extension for now and try again you'll seen the RAM being used drops, then you can always switch them back on again.

My Chrome with 11 extensions switched on is only using 241Mb with just the Neowin home page open.

The best thing to do would be to press 'Shift+Esc' as this opens the 'More Tools>Task manager' in Chrome to look at the memory usage per process and extension.

[Nexus1974]

I only had 1 tab open and that was using nearly 1.5 GB of ram. In the latest versions of Chrome if you hover mouse over each tab, you will see how much ram that is being used just for that tab and I know about each process in task manager, again the chrome.exe process was using over 1.5 GB of ram.

Memory usage does seems a bit better now but of all the sites I visit Neowin is still the worst offender.

As can see here 1.1 GB on a newly loaded page

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

The issue seems to be the adverts on the front page.

They cause Chrome to spawn many additional processes and take up a fair bit of CPU usage when you are idle on the main page:

 

When the adverts don't load Chrome has 7 processes running when idle on the main page, CPU usage is also at 0%:

 

The J.P. Morgan adverts constantly re-load the page when the video in the top middle plays to the end:

[Steven P. Administrators]

Thanks for the reports, I'll escalate this with my ad contact today. I am pretty sure it is the rotating ads that do not require a page refresh, it happens to me as well so surely they can do something about it!

It was as bad with our previous advertiser in 2021 too (they also dynamically updated ads in the page).

[Yodamin]

Maybe this will help you?

 

Add them all up and you get the amount of memory being used by the neowin homepage.

 

In Firefox, in the URL bar use   about:memory

 

in Chrome/edge - who knows?

I use Firefox 99.9 to infinity % of the time

I have two services in which their billing pages do not work properly in anything but a chromium based browser\

--so I use ope-source chromium

 

-- Edge is on my PC because I cannot get rid of it

Chrome would never see my PC-piece of privacy invading tracking and data mining garbage both it and Edge.

 

webIsolated=https://neowin.net (pid 4000)
Explicit Allocations

58.29 MB (100.0%) -- explicit
├──16.27 MB (27.91%) -- window-objects/top(https://www.neowin.net/, id=107)
│  ├──12.51 MB (21.47%) -- active
│  │  ├──12.23 MB (20.98%) -- window(https://www.neowin.net/)
│  │  │  ├───7.87 MB (13.49%) -- layout
│  │  │  │   ├──3.19 MB (05.47%) -- style-structs
│  │  │  │   │  ├──1.69 MB (02.90%) ++ (13 tiny)
│  │  │  │   │  ├──0.84 MB (01.44%) ── Position
│  │  │  │   │  └──0.66 MB (01.13%) ── Display
│  │  │  │   ├──1.41 MB (02.41%) ── style-sheets
│  │  │  │   ├──1.02 MB (01.74%) -- style-sets
│  │  │  │   │  ├──0.93 MB (01.59%) ++ stylist
│  │  │  │   │  └──0.09 MB (00.15%) ── other
│  │  │  │   ├──0.78 MB (01.33%) ++ computed-values
│  │  │  │   ├──0.76 MB (01.31%) ++ pres-arena
│  │  │  │   └──0.72 MB (01.23%) ++ (7 tiny)
│  │  │  ├───2.92 MB (05.02%) -- js-realm(https://www.neowin.net/)
│  │  │  │   ├──1.60 MB (02.75%) -- classes
│  │  │  │   │  ├──0.99 MB (01.70%) -- class(Function)/objects
│  │  │  │   │  │  ├──0.96 MB (01.65%) ── gc-heap
│  │  │  │   │  │  └──0.03 MB (00.06%) ── malloc-heap/slots
│  │  │  │   │  └──0.61 MB (01.05%) ++ (7 tiny)
│  │  │  │   ├──1.09 MB (01.87%) ++ scripts
│  │  │  │   └──0.23 MB (00.39%) ++ (6 tiny)
│  │  │  ├───1.41 MB (02.42%) -- dom
│  │  │  │   ├──0.81 MB (01.38%) ── element-nodes
│  │  │  │   └──0.61 MB (01.04%) ++ (4 tiny)
│  │  │  └───0.03 MB (00.05%) ── property-tables
│  │  └───0.28 MB (00.48%) ++ window(about:blank)
│  └───3.76 MB (06.45%) -- js-zone(0x1bba303ea00)
│      ├──1.36 MB (02.33%) ++ (14 tiny)
│      ├──0.95 MB (01.64%) ── unused-gc-things
│      ├──0.85 MB (01.46%) ++ property-maps
│      └──0.60 MB (01.02%) ++ scopes
├──14.93 MB (25.62%) -- images
│  ├──14.88 MB (25.52%) -- content
│  │  ├──14.72 MB (25.25%) -- raster/used
│  │  │  ├───9.46 MB (16.23%) -- progress=10f
│  │  │  │   ├──7.66 MB (13.13%) ++ (39 tiny)
│  │  │  │   ├──0.93 MB (01.60%) -- image(620x349, https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2024/10/1728499823_hswqnqo_mediump.jpg)
│  │  │  │   │  ├──0.89 MB (01.52%) -- unlocked
│  │  │  │   │  │  ├──0.83 MB (01.42%) -- types=400/surface(620x349, svgContext:[ ])
│  │  │  │   │  │  │  ├──0.83 MB (01.42%) ── decoded-nonheap
│  │  │  │   │  │  │  └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── decoded-heap
│  │  │  │   │  │  └──0.06 MB (00.10%) ++ cannot_substitute/types=400/surface(165x93, svgContext:[ ])
│  │  │  │   │  └──0.05 MB (00.08%) ── source
│  │  │  │   └──0.87 MB (01.49%) -- image(620x349, https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2024/10/1728143864_dsc00597_mediump.jpg)
│  │  │  │      ├──0.83 MB (01.42%) -- unlocked/types=400/surface(620x349, svgContext:[ ])
│  │  │  │      │  ├──0.83 MB (01.42%) ── decoded-nonheap
│  │  │  │      │  └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── decoded-heap
│  │  │  │      └──0.04 MB (00.07%) ── source
│  │  │  ├───4.80 MB (08.23%) -- progress=18f
│  │  │  │   ├──3.08 MB (05.29%) -- image(1760x720, https://www.neowin.net/images/orion/sprite.png)
│  │  │  │   │  ├──3.06 MB (05.24%) -- unlocked
│  │  │  │   │  │  ├──2.88 MB (04.94%) -- types=400
│  │  │  │   │  │  │  ├──1.44 MB (02.47%) -- surface(960x393, svgContext:[ ])
│  │  │  │   │  │  │  │  ├──1.44 MB (02.47%) ── decoded-nonheap
│  │  │  │   │  │  │  │  └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── decoded-heap
│  │  │  │   │  │  │  └──1.44 MB (02.47%) -- surface(960x392, svgContext:[ ])
│  │  │  │   │  │  │     ├──1.44 MB (02.47%) ── decoded-nonheap
│  │  │  │   │  │  │     └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── decoded-heap
│  │  │  │   │  │  └──0.18 MB (00.30%) ++ cannot_substitute/types=400
│  │  │  │   │  └──0.03 MB (00.05%) ── source
│  │  │  │   ├──1.56 MB (02.67%) -- image(1760x720, https://cdn.neow.in/news/images/orion/sprite.png)
│  │  │  │   │  ├──1.53 MB (02.62%) -- unlocked
│  │  │  │   │  │  ├──1.44 MB (02.47%) -- types=400/surface(960x393, svgContext:[ ])
│  │  │  │   │  │  │  ├──1.44 MB (02.47%) ── decoded-nonheap
│  │  │  │   │  │  │  └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── decoded-heap
│  │  │  │   │  │  └──0.09 MB (00.15%) ++ cannot_substitute/types=400/surface(234x96, svgContext:[ ])
│  │  │  │   │  └──0.03 MB (00.05%) ── source
│  │  │  │   └──0.16 MB (00.28%) ++ (2 tiny)
│  │  │  └───0.46 MB (00.79%) ++ (2 tiny)
│  │  └───0.16 MB (00.27%) ++ vector/used/progress=18f
│  └───0.06 MB (00.10%) ── cache/overhead
├──14.61 MB (25.06%) -- js-non-window
│  ├───8.20 MB (14.06%) -- zones
│  │   ├──6.74 MB (11.57%) -- zone(0x1bba303ce00)
│  │   │  ├──3.18 MB (05.46%) -- realm([System Principal], shared JSM global)
│  │   │  │  ├──2.84 MB (04.88%) -- classes
│  │   │  │  │  ├──1.23 MB (02.11%) -- class(Object)/objects
│  │   │  │  │  │  ├──1.13 MB (01.95%) ── gc-heap
│  │   │  │  │  │  └──0.10 MB (00.16%) ++ malloc-heap
│  │   │  │  │  ├──0.87 MB (01.48%) -- class(Array)/objects
│  │   │  │  │  │  ├──0.86 MB (01.48%) ── gc-heap
│  │   │  │  │  │  └──0.00 MB (00.01%) ++ malloc-heap
│  │   │  │  │  └──0.75 MB (01.28%) ++ (8 tiny)
│  │   │  │  └──0.34 MB (00.59%) ++ (2 tiny)
│  │   │  ├──2.07 MB (03.54%) ++ (13 tiny)
│  │   │  └──1.49 MB (02.56%) -- realm([System Principal], DevTools (Module loader))
│  │   │     ├──1.08 MB (01.84%) ++ classes
│  │   │     └──0.42 MB (00.72%) ++ (4 tiny)
│  │   ├──0.96 MB (01.64%) -- zone(0x1bba303c000)
│  │   │  ├──0.84 MB (01.45%) -- strings/string(<non-notable strings>)
│  │   │  │  ├──0.69 MB (01.18%) -- gc-heap
│  │   │  │  │  ├──0.69 MB (01.18%) ── latin1
│  │   │  │  │  └──0.00 MB (00.00%) ── two-byte
│  │   │  │  └──0.15 MB (00.26%) ++ malloc-heap
│  │   │  └──0.11 MB (00.20%) ++ (4 tiny)
│  │   └──0.50 MB (00.85%) ++ (2 tiny)
│  ├───5.14 MB (08.82%) -- runtime
│  │   ├──3.15 MB (05.41%) ── script-data
│  │   ├──1.24 MB (02.13%) ++ (12 tiny)
│  │   └──0.75 MB (01.28%) ── shared-immutable-strings-cache
│  ├───1.27 MB (02.17%) -- gc-heap
│  │   ├──1.00 MB (01.72%) ── unused-chunks
│  │   └──0.27 MB (00.46%) ++ (2 tiny)
│  └───0.00 MB (00.00%) ++ helper-thread
├───6.87 MB (11.79%) ── heap-unclassified
├───1.78 MB (03.05%) -- threads
│   ├──1.11 MB (01.91%) ++ stacks
│   └──0.67 MB (01.14%) -- overhead
│      ├──0.63 MB (01.09%) ── kernel
│      └──0.03 MB (00.06%) ++ (2 tiny)
├───1.64 MB (02.81%) -- layout
│   ├──1.42 MB (02.44%) -- style-sheet-cache
│   │  ├──1.42 MB (02.43%) ── document-shared
│   │  └──0.00 MB (00.01%) ── unshared
│   └──0.21 MB (00.37%) ++ servo-ua-cache
├───1.18 MB (02.02%) ++ (18 tiny)
└───1.01 MB (01.73%) ++ gfx

 

 

[Yodamin]

AS an add-on to my last post

I am a privacy advocate

I use all kinds of dns blocking scripts at the firewall level

I use Firefox with ublock origin installed

So the reduction in memory usage of the Neowin (and all websites really) is vastly reduced for me

total memory usage of Firefox with 5 tabs open is 900MB - about 200mb of that is extensions - so removing the extensions would bring my memory usage down to approx. 700MB for five open tabs

(686.xxMB actually-I just closed all other tabs except the Neowin one and voila!)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

---BELOW IS  is OPINION and probably not what everyone wants to read---ignore it if you do not care about private data being collected arbitrarily by corporations-----------------

DO I feel bad about blocking all the advertising? Absolutely not, I didn't start it - the corporations and business that use them with their devious and aggressive advertising and data mining tactics shoved me violently into this solution (for me).

Today's internet is an orgy of stealing private data, web browsing habits, and advertising. We new this would happen back in 1994 when the first banner add was found floating across the top of a web page....uhg - disgusting!

As soon as you allow a any business into anything it become just that business-with profit driven agenda's.

However, this is the wild west of internet advertising and the blatant collection of data, in some cases data that is otherwise protected by information privacy laws outside fo the internet, and outright orgy of what I (and millions of others) consider theft of my private information.

Remember, there is NOTHING worth more in this world than information (except life itself) and private information is arguably worth the most.

SO why is everyone OK with handing it over to corporate and government interests that trade it around and sell it like a ###### product?

Where is MY profit from MY informational product being sold?

AS far as I am concerned all these corporations and advertisers owe everyone who has ever used the internet in this whole world thousands, and thousands of dollars for the illicit use of their data.

Fingerprint tracking, got that covered with Firefox to extension-sure they still track me--they get  a different fingerprint every time I refresh the page or navigate to it. Good luck with that ass-holes.

When I was younger, I did advertising marketing for a number of firms.

I was not an employee I was a person they contacted many times to come into their group advertising marketing data gathering sessions.

How it worked: an advertising company would contact you and ask if you were interested in answering some questions about advertising strategies (watch commercial and give your opinion of them)

when you agreed they snail mailed you two taxi chits-so you did not have to pay for travel

the sessions were an hour long and usually there was 15-50 people in them

usually bit not always, the session would contain people within a certain age range and demographic

after the hour session was over everyone got a brand new crispy $100 dollar bill.

For about 15 years I attended about 20-30 of these-roughly 2 per year

The the disgusting orgy of stealing private data on the internet began and that was that.

 

Edited October 25, 2024 by Yodamin

[adrynalyne]

On 25/10/2024 at 06:42, Yodamin said:

AS an add-on to my last post

I am a privacy advocate

I use all kinds of dns blocking scripts at the firewall level

I use Firefox with ublock origin installed

So the reduction in memory usage of the Neowin (and all websites really) is vastly reduced for me

total memory usage of Firefox with 5 tabs open is 900MB - about 200mb of that is extensions - so removing the extensions would bring my memory usage down to approx. 700MB for five open tabs

(686.xxMB actually-I just closed all other tabs except the Neowin one and voila!)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

---BELOW IS  is OPINION and probably not what everyone wants to read---ignore it if you do not care about private data being collected arbitrarily by corporations-----------------

DO I feel bad about blocking all the advertising? Absolutely not, I didn't start it - the corporations and business that use them with their devious and aggressive advertising and data mining tactics shoved me violently into this solution (for me).

Today's internet is an orgy of stealing private data, web browsing habits, and advertising. We new this would happen back in 1994 when the first banner add was found floating across the top of a web page....uhg - disgusting!

As soon as you allow a any business into anything it become just that business-with profit driven agenda's.

However, this is the wild west of internet advertising and the blatant collection of data, in some cases data that is otherwise protected by information privacy laws outside fo the internet, and outright orgy of what I (and millions of others) consider theft of my private information.

Remember, there is NOTHING worth more in this world than information (except life itself) and private information is arguably worth the most.

SO why is everyone OK with handing it over to corporate and government interests that trade it around and sell it like a ###### product?

Where is MY profit from MY informational product being sold?

AS far as I am concerned all these corporations and advertisers owe everyone who has ever used the internet in this whole world thousands, and thousands of dollars for the illicit use of their data.

Fingerprint tracking, got that covered with Firefox to extension-sure they still track me--they get  a different fingerprint every time I refresh the page or navigate to it. Good luck with that ass-holes.

When I was younger, I did advertising marketing for a number of firms.

I was not an employee I was a person they contacted many times to come into their group advertising marketing data gathering sessions.

How it worked: an advertising company would contact you and ask if you were interested in answering some questions about advertising strategies (watch commercial and give your opinion of them)

when you agreed they snail mailed you two taxi chits-so you did not have to pay for travel

the sessions were an hour long and usually there was 15-50 people in them

usually bit not always, the session would contain people within a certain age range and demographic

after the hour session was over everyone got a brand new crispy $100 dollar bill.

For about 15 years I attended about 20-30 of these-roughly 2 per year

The the disgusting orgy of stealing private data on the internet began and that was that.

 

How are you expecting sites to survive that do not require a subscription? 

Does the Internet go to a pay wall for everything and dump ads?

You may not like it, and might find it disgusting, but no service is for free, ever.

[Yodamin]

I forgot to say in the above post, I consider a script blocker a basic security component for any web browser on any network.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How are you expecting sites to survive that do not require a subscription?

I do not.

I should have included this but my posts was getting very long.

I should have said.

When I get value from a site I frequent all the time...not once in a while like most pages, I remove the browser protection which allows all or most of the advertising through.

I can, after all, white list websites to.

In some cases I donate yearly.

I donate yearly to a number of open-source projects also.

THEN, of course I pay, like anyone else for various services over the internet, streaming entertainment, VPN, private email, subscriptions to privacy related tools and so on.

I do online purchases lie everyone else.

My intent was not to belittle the benefits of getting big business involved in the internet, obviously it's a better landscape today than the bulletin boards of yesteryear, my intent was to point out that some of them are swapping your data around like trading cards and that we need strong laws to stop it from happening without explicit consent-or at all.

There is no need for it and it is highly invasive.

Europe is making some strong ground in this and North America will follow I am sure.

The real issue is just choice to the individual.

My wife, for example, she wants to see the ads (sigh).

SO. Her PC's and devices are in the whitelist of the firewall and she does not use DNS blockers or script blockers.

I, on the other hand, want to allow what I like to see and that's it.

I have plenty of sites, whitelisted in Ublock.

I had Facebook completely blocked out of my network at one point (lotsa ASN's there I tell yah 🙂)

My wife and son had to connect to the VPN to by-pass the block.

NOW, the VR devices they use and my wife's PC = all whitelisted.

Different strokes and all that.

BUT for now, instead of seeing ugly disgusting ads surrounding the content-I will donate or subscribe in some way if I continue to block ads on the more ad-obnoxious sites.

There really IS no answer.

People like me will remain people like me and same for people lie my wife.

[cooky560 Veteran]

 

This is with 6 tabs open, one of which is a twitch stream so I don't think Neowin's front page is causing any trouble to me!

[hellowalkman Reporter]

711 MB here, on Chrome, with a few extensions

[Accuphase]

On 25/10/2024 at 17:11, Steven P. said:

Thanks for the reports, I'll escalate this with my ad contact today. I am pretty sure it is the rotating ads that do not require a page refresh, it happens to me as well so surely they can do something about it!

It was as bad with our previous advertiser in 2021 too (they also dynamically updated ads in the page).

May I ask what % of visitors are using ad-blockers?

[Steven P. Administrators]

On 13/01/2025 at 16:16, Accuphase said:

May I ask what % of visitors are using ad-blockers?

About half (derived from Google Analytics) which is why the Amazon Deals posts have become so important, as they are sales commission based.

Over 1GB (with ad blocker).

If you frequent Neowin a lot and want to help with the running costs of the site, we have a Tier 2 subscription that professionally strips all ad-related content from the site for $28/year. https://www.neowin.net/subscribe/

[Steven P. Administrators]

I've sent another message. It also affects me as I browse Neowin without any adblocking.

[tsupersonic]

Edge uses about 60-125 MB RAM for just the neowin tab. I have about 60 other tabs open, and Edge is overall consuming ~4 GB RAM

[Steffan]

I'm on Edge the highest I have seen the memory usage is 150MB as well and using about 720 - 770MB total. This is from my work computer, and I use Firefox private browsing for work functions. Which is using 1092MB of memory.

[FloatingFatMan]

On 13/01/2025 at 15:24, Steven P. said:

If you frequent Neowin a lot and want to help with the running costs of the site, we have a Tier 2 subscription that professionally strips all ad-related content from the site for $28/year. https://www.neowin.net/subscribe/

Just a regular schmo's opinion, but I've always felt you'd get more takers for that if it was cheaper.  I whitelist Neowin (except when at work, I have no control of that on my work machine), but I'm not paying a single site $28 to block ads, even if it's for a year. The extra benefits just aren't worth it to me, no matter how much time I spend on here.  Sorry guys.  I'll stick with the ads on-screen and just ignore them.  

As for RAM usage, does it really matter that much?  Most modern browsers will sleep inactive tabs and reclaim memory automatically, and when was the last time you saw an "out of memory" message anyway?    Unused memory is WASTED memory...

[+Edouard Subscriber²]

On 20/01/2025 at 22:36, FloatingFatMan said:

Just a regular schmo's opinion, but I've always felt you'd get more takers for that if it was cheaper.  I whitelist Neowin (except when at work, I have no control of that on my work machine), but I'm not paying a single site $28 to block ads, even if it's for a year. The extra benefits just aren't worth it to me, no matter how much time I spend on here.  Sorry guys.  I'll stick with the ads on-screen and just ignore them.  

As for RAM usage, does it really matter that much?  Most modern browsers will sleep inactive tabs and reclaim memory automatically, and when was the last time you saw an "out of memory" message anyway?    Unused memory is WASTED memory...

FWIW, just my opinion but I feel you're being a little unreasonable.

You're a regular on Neowin and have been for years. This place must feel like a second home for you. 

It's $28 for goodness sake. That's $2.33 per month! 

$2.33 a month for all this site offers you. 

[FloatingFatMan]

On 20/01/2025 at 21:08, Edouard said:

FWIW, just my opinion but I feel you're being a little unreasonable.

You're a regular on Neowin and have been for years. This place must feel like a second home for you. 

It's $28 for goodness sake. That's $2.33 per month! 

$2.33 a month for all this site offers you. 

Well, I don't profess to know what the running costs are for this place, but it's just my personal feeling that the price for ad-free is just a little high.  So I keep the place whitelisted and trust them to keep out the bad ads.  Given how much time I spend here (I never close my browser so just leave the site open), maybe they get more out of me for ad revenue?

 

Honestly, if they announced they were struggling to keep the lights on then I'd be happy to donate, but at heart I'm a cheap son of a bugger... I need a better incentive to let the wallet moths loose!  

[+Edouard Subscriber²]

On 21/01/2025 at 08:17, FloatingFatMan said:

Well, I don't profess to know what the running costs are for this place, but it's just my personal feeling that the price for ad-free is just a little high.  So I keep the place whitelisted and trust them to keep out the bad ads.  Given how much time I spend here (I never close my browser so just leave the site open), maybe they get more out of me for ad revenue?

 

Honestly, if they announced they were struggling to keep the lights on then I'd be happy to donate, but at heart I'm a cheap son of a bugger... I need a better incentive to let the wallet moths loose!  

Fair enough.

Steven did mention a few days ago that around 50% of site visitors block ads. I realize you don't but I had no idea it would be that many.