Thank you to those of you who provided the requested information I asked for. The reason I asked for it is to see if Brave at baseline – that is, by itself without any other major factors playing into it. So far, at baseline, it seems like everyone’s browser is just fine. The three most common reasons for memory drain tend to be
Hardware Acceleration often causes spikes in cpu/memory usage – please try disabling HWA in the browser and see if this helps improve performance ( Settings --> Additional Settings --> System --> Hardware Acceleration)
Specific websites can cause a spike in resource usage – sometimes this is due to (for example) graphically demanding websites (Twitch, HQ YT videos, etc) or may also be sites that have a considerable amount of ads/trackers blocked. Check and see if there’s a common connection between high resource usage and your browsing habits. If we can isolate a site(s) that are causing spikes like this we can submit a report and get the issue looked at.
Some extensions may cause conflict with the browser or certain websites. Given the variety of extensions and possible setups it’s hard to pin this on one in particular. But it’s always worth checking to see if extensions have any part to play in this type of behavior – simply disable them temporarily (I recommend one at a time) and test to see if performance improves.
@adamalpha, in your case I’m a bit confused because your task manager shows 40% memory usage but the amount of memory used actually isn’t all that high – how much memory do you have in your system?
Hi @Mattches, I am too puzzled at this. Memory is 14gb which I would have thought would have been sufficient for most things. Any idea what might be happening here?
@adamalpha,
You have 41 tabs/processes open. Whether these processes are all different tabs, or extensions, or tabs + extensions or some other combination – 41 processes from any application is going to cause use significant resources.
I would imagine that if you did not have so many open tabs and/or extensions, you would see the memory usage drop significantly. This is why I asked earlier to see what Brave was taking up (wrt system resources) at baseline. It doesn’t help to know what Brave is doing when there are 41 tabs (lets say) open at once – the spike could be caused by one or multiple or all of those sites.
We need to narrow down the possibilities and figure out whether or not Brave itself is taking up a ton of resources by default (which it shouldn’t) or if high resource usage is simply reflecting high/impactful browser usage.
> 41 processes from any application is going to cause use significant resources.
@mattches Can you clarify which resources you’re referring to?
I generally think of “resources” as referring to CPU.
I currently have 177 tabs in 27 windows. Many of the tabs are ‘sleeping’ via The Great Suspender, but most – I’d estimate about half of them – aren’t.
My CPU usage, checked several times over approximately 20 minutes in Activity Monitor (Mac), has been between 1.83% - 2.88% – i.e., very slight.
(I will follow your advice to turn HDW accel. off as soon as I can – it requires a BRAVE reload, which I can’t do at the moment. But do I even need to do that given the above CPU usage figures?)
@Mattches, in the first image I supplied I had just one single window/tab open (as you had requested) yet the memory usage was still quite high. I note that with just 1 tab open the image shows 12 active processes, is this right or noemal?
When I use Brave with a large number of tabs it doesn’t generally cause an issue, however my issue is isolated to a single website which I can’t run on Brave but works fine on Chrome, running several tabs at the same time doesn’t cause me issues unless I visit that single website which then causes it to crash after 2 mins or so.
This is why we ask that stuff – so the issue you’re describing is one of web compatibility, not of resource usage. If you can open a topic here on Community with the necessary details and the offending site, we can take a look at what’s going on internally.
Maybe is it hardware acceleration or too many Tabs. Brave browser on my laptop is consuming 800MB + even i have 6tabs and the GPU it is super minimal did you check all of yoir background process?
I’m not trying to be rude here at all, but no one (at least not me) works with only one tab open & every time you start brave up of course it’s going to be fresh & fine, so IMO, that’s not a good way to gauge things.
If Brave only works well with only one tab open, then I won’t be able to use it anymore.
I know that’s not what you are saying, but your test kind of implies it.
I did turn off the hardware thingy & will restart as soon as I finish this.
Also, along with high memory, I mentioned CPU & no one else on here is talking about that. So that’s a different issue, right?
No, it doesn’t. Again, as seem to keep having to repeat – the test is to see what Brave is using as a baseline.
When someone goes to take a lie detector test, the very first thing they do is ask you some easy yes/no questions that have obvious answers – such as, “Is your name Mattches?”, “Do you live in the United States?”, “Are you X years old?” – in order to establish a baseline for what that person’s vital activity looks like. They then compare the baseline to answers given to them in order to tell whether or not someone may be lying about something.
Asking users to open the browser “fresh” is a way to establish a baseline. If you open the browser with one tab and your RAM or CPU usage is already spiking – something is wrong with the browser itself or there is likely something wrong with the starting configuration of the browser (perhaps there is an issue with a particular extension installed, for example). However, if you launch Brave and everything is fine, we have now narrowed down the potential causes and/or places to look for the offending issue. For example, just above in this thread we had a user state:
So for this user, the problem isn’t Brave and has nothing to do with their system specs – the problem is directly related to a specific website. Now that we know that, we can get that information and work with our Shields/web compat. team and apply a fix.
This is part of the troubleshooting process – in fact, the very first step in pretty much any troubleshooting “guidelines” will be “Identify the problem”. This is why I requested the information/test that I did.
So, if you are just seeing this thread or still are confused why I asked the information I asked, please provide that information, then see a short list of common causes you can test against in a previous comment I made here:
Just because it’s not using a ton of RAM or CPU usage, with only the start page, but then runs it up once you begin opening windows and tabs, seems like that would only mean your Brave app isn’t corrupt or damaged. But if it runs up a lot of memory, simply by using it, as one would use any browser, then it can still mean something isn’t right, as there are also other buggy behavior, like pics or pages not opening, topsites disappearing, etc. Most people who use the internet have a good number of open windows, but I wonder if Brave keeps every tab on every window, open, and active, which would greatly drive up the RAM usage.
Seems a well-made browser would only make tabs active when they are in the front of each window, as there’s no sense in having them all on, when 75% of them aren’t needed. And I’m not willing to erase all my tabs and windows, just to get to a “baseline”, as I’m not sure how I’d get them back. Do you know a way I could close, say 40 tabs, yet be able to get them back?
You can also bookmark all open tabs at once – they will all be put in the same folder for you to open later. Additionally, if you close a window with a ton of tabs open in it, it will appear in your History:
Further – these are separate issues that you (@StevenCee) can raise in their own topics. Lets try and keep the discussion as close to the topic title as possible.
@OurFreeSociety,
For you can I can almost assure you that the high resource usage is due to the several extensions you have installed in the browser (among other factors but this is likely the most prominent).
So for this user, the problem isn’t Brave and has nothing to do with their system specs – the problem is directly related to a specific website. Now that we know that, we can get that information and work with our Shields/web compat. team and apply a fix.
