Website Unusable, CPU Spikes (Multiple Browsers Tested)

mayimagpie

For a few weeks the website has slowly been breaking for me. I first noticed lag when searching full-text and some visual issues like the standardized place auto-fill box appearing at the bottom of the page, annoying but I was still able to research. The issues have gotten significantly worse the last few days, attempting to use search functions causes 100%+ CPU spikes that freeze my entire browser.

For reference, I am using Firefox 135.0.1 and Sequoia 15.3.1 on a 2019 MacBook Pro. I have cleared cache & cookies, disabled all extensions, tried FF troubleshoot mode, reinstalled browser, reset FF profile and I was able to replicate the issue using Chrome and Vivaldi. I can share a link to FF profiler for devs if that would be helpful.

maryellenstevensbarnes1

@mayimagpie Your question landed in the Indexing section of the community but from your mention of standardized place auto-fill box I think you might be using the Opportunities under Get Involved to work on place names. Can you send a screenshot or snip so a moderator @Ashlee C. can see if she can direct you better. Sorry, I know nothing about programming or computer issues

No one in particular

I first noticed lag when searching full-text and some visual issues like the standardized place auto-fill box appearing at the bottom of the page, annoying but I was still able to research. The issues have gotten significantly worse the last few days, attempting to use search functions causes 100%+ CPU spikes that freeze my entire browser.

For me, viewing docs was slow and CPU intensive (Win10, non-Chromium, i7-3xxx). Pages routinely take 30-45 sec to render and often didn't load fully. I got a hold of a modern Ryzen Pro powered notebook and tried again.

While the document viewer behaves much better, it is still very CPU intensive. Switching from one census page to the next can take 2 -5 seconds while maxing out all 12 performance cores. I'm playing with Dev Tools and Firefox's new Profiler. Visually, the doc viewer pages have a lot of layers and elements. I'm no web coder tho; I can't intuit how that might complicate the load times.

I'll keep poking. Maybe I'll spot something.

No one in particular

To the mods, et al: We know you are operating under more load than capacity. We want to sympathize. Please drop us an occasional line on how things are there so we can commiserate properly.

SerraNola

I concur that image viewing, search, and probably other functions are plodding along slower than usual. Engineering recognizes the high impact and urgency and is fully engaged to try to get things back to normal. At least it's good to know that we can "commiserate properly" here. Thank you for your patience.

David Alan Webber

I don't know if this suggestion means much to most, but I wonder if there are some database requests or transactions being pushed to the client webbrowser that come through as not making sense to the client, but that result in the client reaching back home over and over again?

Or basically, some kind of error-driven back and forth between the main site and the users' computers?