Many, many problems - is Vivaldi broken?
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Sorry for the subject line, but it's honestly how it feels for me, and I am at my wits end as this is badly interfering with my work.
In my hands, yesterday it started a new nastiness where it takes >15 minutes to start up. (Yes, I wrote 15 minutes. Even longer at the moment ) It's never done this prior to yesterday. There's one Renderer processes burning up the CPU at 130-160% CPU usage and the rest more-or-less idle while it does this. It does eventually present the contents…
But that's only the latest twist. These all seem to track from since version 3.
For me at least, it seems to have no real memory or threading management. New actions seem to just add more memory and threads, but these seem to never be cleaned up. For example, if you close a tab, you'd expect the associated memory and thread to be released. The effect is that Vivaldi is a recurring train wreck, quickly growing to many gigabytes of memory, which, in turn, causes the system to thrash. The only way I've found to "manage" this is to cycle the browser: quit and start over. (But, of course now restarting takes 15+ minutes this is no longer workable )
Starting over kicks out the junk - it starts well and promisingly, but once you've added, say, a handful of tabs, or done more than a dozen or two clicks on links or whatever, it's blown back up to huge amounts of memory (say, 2Gb+) and many threads (often with a lot memory).
This doesn't seem to be dependent on the number of idle tabs, at least not in a simple way, but rather the number of actions the user does. Remember it starts well, it's what is done subsequently that causes it to blow out.
On top of that it won't execute stuff in the background that I would have thought it should. For example, if I open a link in another tab, rather than that happening in the background, I'm locked out of the entire app until that page is loaded. (Often it acts as if it were a single-threaded app, with the thread locked on resources, but it's clearly got separate threads etc., so this is "appearances only", but it doesn't feel like that!)
Loading new pages can take ages. It seems to load the core body of the page reasonably quickly, but then get stuck in a cycle (loop?) of "waiting" and "connecting" to a long list of things widgets and whatnot, which takes ages. This is new from about version 3, and I was initially left wondering if this was tied in with the then new anti-tracking effort. (So I waited, hoping it'd get resolved…)
These actions, too, are not happening in the background—I'm locked out during this, I can't do anything with the browser, not even scroll the page that on the face of it would seem is loaded.
On top of that some pages never seem to never properly complete loading. If I load, say, a page from bioRvix (scientific preprints), I have to click on the 'X' to nominally stop the page loading even though the content itself seems to have loaded. Then it will present the favicon in the tabs sidebar, and seems to finally actually be loaded. (I can't use Zotero to file references until pages are fully loaded.)
There's also that there's a pause after a page/tab is loaded, where there is no indication any action is happening, but you can't interact with the page for several seconds.
To add insult on top of these (and more—this would get too long if I listed them all) the GPU process frequently loses the plot. I've seen it try get 20Gb of memory, for example. This appears to be a well-known problem; love to see it tackled.
I have no idea what's behind all this, but I'm tempted to suggest memory and thread management needs a makeover?? But what do I know?
Before anyone makes suggestions - I'm aware of things like the animation setting, clearing out caches, cookies, etc. Nothing seems to make a difference.
Perhaps there are OS versions it just doesn't work well on?
Perhaps some installations/update just bork? (If so, it'd be nice to have a reinstall option from the menu.)
Etc…I could try manually downloading and re-installing over the current installation, but I'd prefer to understand what's wrong first if I can.
Vivaldi 3.3.2022.36 (=latest), MacOS 10.14.6, MacBook Air 2015.
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@GrantJacobs No one would use Vivaldi did it behave this way for everybody. I can see the RAM uptick myself just from using the application, but after hours of usage I’m well under 200MB. Does it behave this way on a fresh profile too? How many tabs do you have open in general?
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@GrantJacobs
Hi, I am not on OSX but I would start with a Guest profile and close the other window to except your settings and extensions.
https://help.vivaldi.com/article/guest-view/
It is more or less a clean profile as @luetage mention.
I remember one other user report memory leaks on OSX, will try to find the post and edit here.Cheers, mib
EDIT: There was more than one but older reprts.
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/49633/memory-leak-in-vivaldi -