Opera 8.01 and neowin.net scroll problem


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I'm new around and noticed that when I scroll with the mouse up/down (mostly on first page - neowin.net) my processor is using almost all it's power (~100% - 1.6 centrino, 512 RAM, Opera 8.01) ?! Very odd ..

Anyone confirm?

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Does it stay at 100% or does it just jump to 100%? What operating system? Are you sure this isn't happening with other browsers as well?

I can make all 3 browsers (Opera 8.01, Firefox 1.1 Deer Park Alpha, and Internet Explorer 6 SP2) on my machine jump to 100% when scrolling (albeit, I had to scroll very quickly) and then settle back down in the single-digits. I believe the increased processor usage is a result of the GDI display system in Windows, rather than a fault in any of the browsers. The GDI display system uses the CPU to draw things to the screen and the quick scrolling probably stresses it a bit. Longhorn uses the GPU to draw things, so we'll probably see dramatically reduced CPU resource consumption :)

Windows XP Professional SP2 (Fully Patched) - 1.33ghz AMD Athlon

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@megamanXplosion - Yes, same jumping here. When I first posted I only have tried this on Firefox 1.0.4 and processor draining was half as much. Now I made it with IE 6 and it's same like Opera.

This thing bugged me so much, that I made Ghost image of C: and restored PC (laptop) to original state - result was the same - big CPU usage. So I thing everything is normal.

The only fact that makes me wonder is that there are guys like @Galley, that have complete different picture?!

@Galley, tell pls what is your OS and CPU? I'm on Win XP, SP2 too.

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He's probably not scrolling as fast as we were. If I scroll slowly then all of the browsers jump to ~20% CPU usage. If I scroll moderately quick then they jump to ~50%. If I scroll very quickly then it jumps to ~100%. CPU usage increases the more Windows has to redraw the screen; once the screen-redraws are complete the CPU usage shrinks back to single digits.

I disabled smooth scrolling in each of the browsers to test if it was the GDI display system in Windows. I noticed that it was a lot harder to reach the % of CPU-usage under the same scrolling speed under all browsers. Smooth scrolling causes the screen to update much more frequently (it moves the display up/down 1-2 pixels at a time and draws the screen with the CPU, move and draw, move and draw, then stop where it needs to be.)

It appears that the problem is with the GDI display system in Windows and nothing application-specific. This is perfectly normal behaviour on Windows. One solution to reduce the CPU-usage is to disable smooth scrolling.

Hope this helps :)

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