Vivaldi freezes for several minutes when starting / CPU usage in the background

MrWagner

Hello,

I use Vivaldi 7.0.3495.29 on Windows 10 Home.

Whenever I start Vivaldi in the morning, the browser freezes. It doesn't crash, but I can't enter anything or click on anything. I then have to wait. I've had this problem for several updates. The task manager then shows CPU usage for the Vivaldi app. There are no extensions installed or anything like that.

I would like to find out what this is? What can I do?

mib2berlin

@MrWagner
Hi, how many tabs you have open at start?
Maybe you have disabled Lazy Loading in Settings > General, then Vivaldi have to load all tabs at start.

MrWagner

@mib2berlin
There are no Tabs open, just Google as Starting Page.

I can only observe it and describe it better, but it would be good to know what I can check or what I have to pay attention to

fredless

@MrWagner said in Vivaldi freezes for several minutes when starting / CPU usage in the background:

Whenever I start Vivaldi in the morning, the browser freezes.

I've had a problem similar to this going back many months on one machine among several I use: on startup, I am stuck looking at the grey Vivaldi logo splash screen on all windows\tabs for close to a minute before it clears - and then the browser seems to operate normally. I can switch between them, but they are all just sitting there. Doesn't seem to matter how many windows\tabs I had open prior, I've tried cleaning\closing all, and the behavior seems unaffected. I have a few "normie" extensions, but disabling all of them doesn't change this behavior either. This happens on my primary workstation (which has plenty of CPU\GFx\mem spec) and I do an "everything" sync to several other lower spec Windows laptops - and none of those other machines exhibit a similar issue. It initially didn't behave this way, but somewhere along the way something changed.

I'm not particularly interested in deleting my profile and "starting fresh" in hopes that it corrects the problem (at least until it surfaces again) - I'd really appreciate the know-how to self-troubleshoot and understand a problem like this.

mib2berlin

@MrWagner @fredless
Hi, these slow starts could be cause by third party security software or extensions.
A user report these extensions slow down start to minutes, for example:
"Powerful Pixiv Downloader" and
"Pixiv Fanbox Downloader" very long start time of Vivaldi.

@fredless
Any difference in AV, firewall software between your workstation and the laptops?
Just create a second profile to test this, open a few tabs, close and open the profile.
If this work it is may really your profile, it doesn't fix itself.
I reset my profile several times a Year, takes me a few minutes to get Vivaldi in a working state.
It depends on your workflow.

MrWagner

Hello mib2berlin,

there are no extensions installed and no third-party antivirus for Windows (only Defender). I'll try a different profile

The problem at least a little more precisely:

-I open Vivaldi, see my homepage www.google.de
-Vivaldi doesn't freeze immediately when it starts, but a second later.

-During this time, Vivaldi's CPU usage is at ~16%, according to the extended display it is seems using one core completly of 12, but this one core is not 100% occupied either.
-During this time, Vivaldi doesn't react to anything, but I can hover over GUI elements and there is also visual feedback here. But nothing happens. If I open three new tabs in this state nothing happens. When Vivaldi has calmed down again, the three tabs open.

-This takes at least 30 seconds, sometimes minutes.
-Sometimes Vivaldi reacts briefly as if everything were normal, but after a few seconds starts again. At some point the fun is over and I can use Vivaldi normally. However, Vivaldi cannot be used immediately after starting

mib2berlin

@MrWagner
You can imagine if Vivaldi work like this for everyone nobody would use it.
You can test to disable hardware acceleration in Settings > Webpages, maybe it is a Vivaldi/GPU/driver issue.
This is just guessing at this point, to be honest I have no idea.
A broken user profile is the only thing I can think of.
Did you downgrade Vivaldi at some point?

MrWagner

@mib2berlin
Thank you very much, I can only try it.

But what I don't understand is that it only seems to happen after starting the PC (not yet examined in detail) So really in the morning when I turn on the PC and then start Vivaldi. i got problems. When the phase is over, Vivaldi runs and then I can close Vivaldi and restart it, no problems when the phase is over.

If I close Vivaldi, then Vivaldi should be completely closed? Or are there still processes or tasks running in the background, possibly from Chrome or are any files stored by the operating system for runtime? It can't be Vivaldi's fault and the Defender is doing something, who knows. But Vivaldi has a long CPU load when starting up, which I wouldn't describe as normal

mib2berlin

@MrWagner
Check chrome://settings/system if background apps are enabled.
It takes 3-4 seconds to get Vivaldi < 1% on my older laptop, with mail and calendar running, no this is not normal.

d723k

I have the same problem. Vivaldi freezes on the first launch after turning on the computer. I don’t have the patience to wait for it to unfreeze. I am forced to end the task — I shut down Vivaldi through Task Manager. Then I launch Vivaldi again, and it works without any issues; I can open and close the browser as much as I like. However, as soon as I restart the computer, the first launch of Vivaldi inevitably leads to freezing.

I don’t have any extensions installed, I’m not using a profile, and only one blank tab opens at startup. I have Norton Antivirus installed, but disabling it doesn’t solve the problem. The processor and memory are not under heavy load. I have an old NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 graphics card, but its driver is up to date.

I have been using Vivaldi for several years, but the problem started over a month ago. Reinstalling it in a different folder did not help.

DoctorG

On Windows 11 i see first startup takes 15 second, but when UI is shown, no freeze.
In rare cases connected calendars and mail accounts can cause slow reaction.
Full freezes over 20-40 secs only with web apps consuming much ressources like Slack.

@d723k Please try the troubleshooting steps, including testing in a clean profile and disabling adblocking/extensions:
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/troubleshoot/troubleshooting-issues/

Try download installer for 7.1.3570.39 from https://vivaldi.com/de/download/, uninstall Vivaldi without installer deleting browser data, and then reinstall.
PS: Disabling Norton antivirus is not the same as removing it.

MrWagner

@DoctorG
@mib2berlin

After four attempts to start the operating system, it seems to be due to the Vivaldi profile:

-If I shut down the PC and start with a different profile, everything runs smoothly.
-If I then change the profile, Vivaldi crashes (freezes) for several minutes.
-Tested 4 times, the same behavior four times and clear indication that it is due to the profile.

It is also noticeable that the other profile requires significantly more memory, 100-200MB. I have no idea why either? What does Vivaldi load? Any cache data, but that shouldn't play a role at startup and here I should be able to see the size somehow?

LonM

I have experienced this as well. There is an open bug for this VB-104310. I will add your experiences to that.

mib2berlin

@LonM
If it work in a clean profile is this not a corrupted profile?

LonM

@mib2berlin From my experience it doesn't happen all the time, so I'm not convinced it is a profile problem.

MrWagner

@LonM
Can i view open bug VB-104310 somewhere?

From what I remember, it happens to me every morning, sometimes more or less severely. Felt like it was getting worse day by day. But that could be my imagination. I do somethimes what @d723k did and kill the task using the task manager, although that doesn't always help.

LonM

@MrWagner Bug reports are closed and only visible to testers and developers.

Is there anything you think might be special about the profile you see this on? Like very large bookmarks file, history file, lots of mail accounts?

MrWagner

@LonM
In my opinion nothing special about the profile, so I'm a bit surprised by the behavior. The browser is only used for very active web surfing, I don't actually install any extensions. I don't use the mail functions either. I have about 200 bookmarks, but that shouldn't really be a problem.

At first I thought it might be because of the browser history. That was a main reason for switching to Vivaldi, because the history is actually well structured. I hadn't deleted it since installing Vivaldi several years ago. Since the browser history has always been relatively slow and still has performance problems for me, I decided to delete it completely in 12/2024. But the problems still was present. The history is currently only 1 month old. I also made a post here about the browser history at the end of 2023.

What I would also like to note is that I always look through all the settings of the programs. Some settings may no longer be set to default.

LonM

@MrWagner Thanks for replying. It is difficult to narrow down the cause of this.

fredless

@mib2berlin said in Vivaldi freezes for several minutes when starting / CPU usage in the background:

Any difference in AV, firewall software between your workstation and the laptops?

nope - because I transition my work often between several machines, I'm rather type-A\disciplined about the setups across all of them. Excluding the differences necessitated by differing hardware, they are as close to identical as a reasonable person can get them.

Just create a second profile to test this, open a few tabs, close and open the profile.

should have mentioned this before - I do use multiple profiles, and this problem only shows itself in my default\main profile on that one machine. So probably safe to say it is something in the profile somewhere.

I reset my profile several times a Year, takes me a few minutes to get Vivaldi in a working state.

yuck - of course this should not be an accepted norm for our users. I had some performance problems a few years back, where opening\closing tabs would intermittently become very impacted and laggy, and similar workarounds were suggested then as well.

And so I guess what I was hoping to get more understanding around - and I'm a software engineer in an entirely different topic area, so willing and able to dig in - is there any kind of tracing or logging I can examine to help me better self-diagnose potential root causes of a startup problem like this? I really don't like the prospect taking a hammer to the profile whenever it exhibits misbehavior; this is disruptive - but more importantly, and leaves us all with zero understanding of where and whether there is a problem that needs closer inspection.