Troubleshooting random but persistent lag

fredless

@fredless said in Vivaldi power user review - The good, the bad and the ugly:

Weeks new to Vivaldi after getting exasperated with where Chrome\Edge\FF have collectively been going as well, and relate strongly to some of the bits under the GOOD and BAD in particular as called out by @CuriousD. I've intentionally stayed away from enabling any extensions or fiddling too much under the hood while I try first to become firmly grounded in the default experience shipping with Vivaldi.

The worst thing for me has been lag very similar to what is described in the OP - the browser will stop responding across the tab and rendered page parts of the UI for anywhere from 2-30+ seconds. This happens seemingly at random on Windows, when:

trying to open a new tab

trying to close a tab

clicking a hyperlink on a page

calling a hyperlink from another program

This is somewhat aggravated\exacerbated by the fact that I personally find the UI cues for when the browser is busy doing something (those being the refresh button turning into an on the address bar, and the rather unassuming progress circle on the tab bar) versus the browser being "idle" in respect to a page refresh to be far less clear than other common browsers. This may be something I need more time to grow accustomed to - but is a "learning curve" in a core part of the UX really a good idea?

As things stand, I've found myself quite often inadvertently repeating whatever action I was attempting in the list above 2-3 times before I realize it's not me, it's the browser. Happens multiple times a day. Seems to happen most often (but not always) when returning to the browser after spending some time away in another app, but not always and not enough experience yet to spot a clear patttern. I will continue this thread under in the Support forum, but wanted to chime in here first. Thank you for the listen.

Moving here to continue troubleshooting - what is the best way for me to commence submitting additional information around my experience here?

Presently running 5.1.2567.49 (Stable channel) (64-bit) on Windows 10 (21H2 19044.1566).

Ayespy

@fredless You could say something about your hardware... A large number of performance problems wind up being down to hardware.

If you run any sort of 3rd party "security" software, or any app cleaners or registry cleaners, also good to know.

State exactly what extensions you run.

Say what you are doing and on what pages when the problems hit.

pafflick

@fredless As already mentioned by @Ayespy, the issue is most likely caused by some driver/hardware incompatibility or 3rd-party programs interfering with the browser on your end. Before proceeding, take a look at the following threads and the solutions proposed there - perhaps one of them could help in your case:

For more information, please refer to the Troubleshooting issues guide.

fredless

@ayespy said in Troubleshooting random but persistent lag:

@fredless You could say something about your hardware... A large number of performance problems wind up being down to hardware.

Is an Intel NUC8i7HVK:i7-8809 4c 3.10Mhz CPU, onboard Radeon RX Vega M GPU 4MB RAM, 64GB system memory). AMD recently started supporting direct graphics driver updates for this model again, so is running AMD Radeon Driver software version
2021.1203.1435.26251 (Driver version 21.30.37.04-211203a-374970C). There is an Intel HD 630 SoC GPU too, but as far as I can see the discrete GPU is primary for my display setup.

Thanks for the replies - I did take a look at threads attached, and didn't really see anything that spoke to quite what I am experiencing here. Video playback is totally fine. And the browser doesn't go completely non-op and hang up, some on-screen UI elements still respond, read on..

Ironically I encountered this directly after making this post, and a few more things I noticed then:

I attempted to use the menu to navigate to Tools... Settings... the menu bar was responsive, but after I hitting Settings... nothing happened.
I waited maybe about 5 seconds, then went to go open a new tab (I use left-aligned tabs if that makes any difference)... the + button darkened when hovered over, and "color flashed" when clicked, but no new tabs appeared. I hit it about 10 times, and nothing.

So I took my hand off the mouse and waited. About 10-15 seconds later a Settings tab opened followed rapidly by about 10 Start Page tabs.

Could be wrong, but this does not feel entirely like a hardware acceleration type problem, unless something happening on a page somewhere would cause the behavior described. I know the other browsers are fundamentally different, particularly in these areas, but I don't see this type of random "long pause" behavior there or anywhere else on this system - when those browsers bog down, they bog down across the board and tend to stay that way until whatever is causing the problem is corrected.

Ayespy

@fredless This is the kind of behavior seen when some software is grabbing CPU cycles and/or RAM and not leaving anything for your browser to use, OR if some kind of 3rd party security software has its fingers in Vivaldi, "inspecting" every process before allowing it to run.

On a slower machine, I have seen something similar during the 20 seconds or so Vivaldi takes to live-load the half-million or so emails I have, on startup. On startup only, and only in my Vivaldi version that has all five of my email accounts and my email store going back to 2001.

Do you run any extensions, perchance?

I mean, your machine is a lot more muscular than mine, yet Vivaldi never stumbles like that here. Have you ever monitored what your CPU and RAM are doing during these pauses?

fredless

Do you run any extensions, perchance?

none yet, trying to get steeped in "stock" Vivaldi before I tuck into anything too complicated

Have you ever monitored what your CPU and RAM are doing during these pauses?

not specifically, not yet, no; but I can say that the machine is otherwise snappy and shows none of the symptoms typical of memory stack exhaustion (i.e. Photoshop failing to load, Excel's UI failing to refresh properly).. I've also seen this behavior from Vivaldi shortly after doing an OS restart to "clear the decks" so to speak.

One of things I was after when I originally post: when this happens is there any sort of logging or debug that would be useful to capture to help understand better where the waits might be? I tried to grab my phone to video it the last time it happened, but I was too slow to think of it... but even then, not sure how much a video of it happening would help diagnose why it might be happening...

Ayespy

@fredless Well, there's crash logs, but it's not crashing.

Vivaldi's Task Manager (shift+esc) tells you what each tab is using in real time.

Similarly, DevTools/Inspect/Console records and reports errors, but these seldom have anything to do with performance. I have about sixty of them right now for failure to fetch an icon on this very page. Doesn't affect performance.

But it would be fascinating to know if there's a spike in resource usage at the time of a stall. System Task Manager/Performance would track that.

fredless

@ayespy @pafflick so this continues to happen to me fairly regularly. no specific spike I'm observing in perfmon or other weirdness in general. one or more of the vivaldi processes themselves do seem to be churning a bit taking up a portion of one core when it's happening, but not much different than I what sometimes see of it's load when it's not lagging.

on top of the behavior I already mentioned above, I also noticed one other thing in case it is a clue: when it gets in this state, I can type a new URL in the address bar and hit enter and nothing will happen. the refresh button will very briefly change to before going right back to . But there is no progress\waiting indicator in the background color of the address bar itself nor on the tab.

I also spotted another behavior which I think is a definite bug, but is further confounding me from understanding when vivaldi is hung, actually trying to do something, or just sitting idle - I will open another post about that though.

fredless

Checking back in on this. At this point I've not only been using Vivaldi routinely on the machine used in my OP, but also 2 others - one an HP Windows 10 laptop circa 2020, and the other a 2020 Macbook Pro 13".

All 3 machines exhibit the same behavior at different points in use: opening and closing tabs or switching tabs, using either onscreen UI elements or keyboard shortcuts, can experience considerable lag of a few seconds or sometimes 15-20 seconds before the expected action occurs. As long as I'm not opening a new window, the browser content in the currently opened tab generally continues to respond during this behavior (i.e. I can hit CMD-T on my Mac several times, see that nothing is happening, continue interacting with the content in the presently active tab for a while, and then some many seconds later several new tabs will pop). Doesn't seem to matter if I have 5 tabs or 100 tabs open, if the browser was recently restarted or hasn't been restarted in 2 weeks, it strikes constantly. I haven't spotted a pattern with any particular website. I see this issue from my home network, the office, the cafe, cellular data, and other people's home wifi. I still haven't installed a single extension. I'm still on stable across all machines (currently writing this on 5.1.2567.73 (Stable channel) (x86_64) on macOS, where I just experienced a repeat of the delay opening new tab behavior described).

At this point, for me, there is something about how Vivaldi does tab management that seems to be broken or buggy. And I have to conclude it's not something specific to just my circumstance. I appreciate the assistance the community has tried to lend here. I really love nearly everything else about Vivaldi, but this problem is pushing me to go back to prior alternatives - at certain times my work involves opening and closing browser tabs in rapid succession to assist on a time sensitive matter - so having to unpredictably pause and wait on the browser is a non-starter. If there were a way I could help troubleshoot this further, I'd happily volunteer, but not sure what else remains for me to try?

mib2berlin

@fredless
Hi, it is strange this happen on different systems for you, for me it is not reproducible.
My older laptop (Specs in Signature) can open 30 tabs in 20 seconds or more, this is working up to 200 tabs with running 4K Youtube videos at the same time.
Same on my workstation with old i5, RTX 2060 16GB.

You not answer the hint mentioned from @Ayespy , does the internal task manger shows high CPU activity.

What Vivaldi slow down:
Usage of third party security software
Huge history
Long download list
UI animation (vivaldi://settings/appearance/)
Hundreds of tabs
Hardware acceleration (If the GPU is not supported)

Cheers, mib

fredless

@mib2berlin said in Troubleshooting random but persistent lag:

You not answer the hint mentioned from @Ayespy , does the internal task manger shows high CPU activity.

When in this state, actions from the menu bar are also delayed - in other words, I can't raise the browser task manager right away. but it eventually will pop up, and watching it directly afterwards, nothing unusual is happening. nothing much at all is happening across the machine. sure wish I had some debug logs or other way to see where the waits were occurring.

mib2berlin

@fredless
Hm, you cold try a guest profile, it is a clean profile, it exclude all settings and extensions.

https://help.vivaldi.com/article/guest-view/

Close your main windows and test it for some time.

Cheers, mib

fredless

unfortunately I think I am throwing in the towel. I really wanted to stay here - I like the customizability, and I love the mission statement - but I can't accept the performance issues any longer.

The only notable things I've done to Vivaldi since trying to switch to using it as a primary:

import "all" settings (bookmarks, passwords, etc) from my last main browser (Edge)
enabled sync across 4 devices
change the tabs to sit on the left - and change which tab goes active when closing the current tab
changed the page load progress indicator to the spinner

I have no extensions enabled. I see the issues described above in multiple machine and OS setups. I briefly using @mib2berlin's last suggestion of a guest profile, and didn't see the issue in the brief time I tried it - but I also wasn't using the browser in the same way. I can't work efficiently without the stored data from my profile. I do not have issues like this with other browsers on these same machines pressed into more taxing workloads. With Vivaldi, rendered web content pretty much behaves fine (better than other browsers is my general impression), but everything around it (tabs, menus, etc) unpredictably stutters and lags way more often then I am comfortable with. Doesn't seem to matter how many or few tabs I've got going. My hunch is that there are gremlins in this browser's surrounding UI. Hard for me to fathom how it is impacting me but seemingly so few others.

I'm far less concerned with the issues that happen, software issues of course happen, than the fact that I seemingly have no effective way to narrow in on whatever might be causative.

mib2berlin

@fredless
Hi again, a guest profile is a clean profile, no extensions, default settings.
Sometimes it is not enough to disable an extensions, you have to remove it.
To make sure you can simple move or rename your default profile folder "Default", the path to it is shown in the Help > About menu.
Test for some time, don´t change anything.
Before you sync the new created profile disable extensions.
Sync, test again.
More information:
https://help.vivaldi.com/article/full-reset-of-vivaldi/

You can always delete the new profile and copy or rename your old profile back.

Cheers, mib