I’ve developed the habit of clicking on news links but not reading them right away. (For example, if I’m browsing SDMB, see a news link, but want to keep browsing SDMB before I read the story.)
Just now my machine came to almost a complete halt. Even the mouse pointer moved very sluggishly. I know from prior experience that it would take a minute or more just to load the Alt-Ctl-Delete Task Manager but I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping that Manager open. I saw that my memory utilization was 99%, other utilizations were very high, and one Google Chrome process was using 1400 MB of memory. :smack: I killed that process and things cleared up.
Before killing it, I did a screen-grab (so I could see which Chrome tab disappeared), but must have pressed the window-grab key instead. (I’d have checked first by pasting into Paint, but the machine was so sluggish getting to Paint was an ordeal I gave up on.) Nevermind — Chrome shows a distinctive “Something went wrong” message for the tab with the killed process.
Experimenting a little, I saw that pages from nymag.com, politico.com, washingtonexaminer.com and perhaps edition.cnn.com were all causing trouble. Their pages are ridiculously large when they load, but that’s normal these days. The problem is that they keep growing and growing, and consuming CPU time even though I’ve not even accessed the page to read it. I guess the one that had grown to 1400 MB had just been sitting there the longest.
Do others have this problem? Is it a symptom of a virus only loosely related to the sites that cause trouble? Now that I’m aware of it, and aware that this is one reason my machine sometimes becomes unusably slow, I’ll watch out for it.
Good news: some of my favorite news sites, including washingtonpost.com and theatlantic.com, do not exhibit this problem. (I’m not sure about nytimes.com — I don’t want to waste one of my ten free articles to test it! )
I have a flash and popup blocker, etc. When I go to Politico or Real Clear Politics, I get a notification that “Firefox prevented this page from automatically reloading”.
Damn, here I thought we were going to blast Firefox and playing video. Firefox absolutely fries my CPU with video - temps hit 90° C within minutes. IE or Chrome? Under 30° C, even if I have to say three Hail Marys every time I open IE. If I could just get Chrome to not automatically install to the C drive…
Adding up the memory shown by Task Manager I get about 1.6GB. (This is now, with the bad news tabs killed.) Task Manager displays 63% memory. But I have 4GB memory. (1.6/4.0 = 40%) What gives?
Yes. And I have 16 Chrome tabs open right now, with 64% memory usage, most of which is Chrome. But all these tabs put together are using less memory than the one 1.4GB process from washingtonexaminer.com or whatever it was.
My 4GB laptop is sometimes slower than the 1GB laptop I had three years ago. Does Chrome expand, like a gas in a vacuum, to “take full advantage”?
Forty-odd years ago I was given sole charge of a computer, to write an OS for it, etc. My boss apologized for its .00006GB (i.e. 64KB) memory — “Yes, that’s ridiculously big; don’t feel you have to use it all.”
With Firefox, I could recommend an addon that will unload the page, or even never completely load it until you click on the tab. With Chrome, I can just point out that such addons exist, and suggest you look into them. Just Google “chrome unload inactive tabs” and go through the options.
Try Safari on an iPad! A lot of those pages never load the actual content I want to read at all, because the ads hang everything up. They all say that they have apps, but I don’t want 500 apps on this thing that I maybe use once in a month. I want to be able to find the ones I use all the time.
With Firefox — I’m not going to say how many tabs are up; but it’s 8 windows on 3 virtual desktops for tidiness — the problem is solved by ticking ‘Don’t load tabs until open’ in preferences.
Poor stupid Chrome doesn’t have this ( believe me, I looked ) so I installed Tabkeeper ‘Automatically closes inactive tabs and makes it easy to get them back.’ However although it does indeed reserve the tabs from plain sight [ I got it because poor stupid Chrome concertinaed the tabs in the top row instead of going past the boundaries ], each tab process is still discretely there in memory…
I remember when they introduced poor stupid Chrome, separate processes were touted as the best thing since sliced bread, since the visible browser memory was down — however there were now all these little processes running instead…
It happened again, this time at nature.com. I clicked a link from an SDMB post, read the abstract but didn’t X-away the window. Perhaps I was thinking of rereading the abstract, perhaps I was thinking of asking how many Dopers paid $39 for the whole article. Anyway, it may be slovenly to leave such old tabs around but it’s not supposed to be damaging. I do housekeep the unused tabs whenever an unwieldy number accumulates.
After an hour and half or so, my machine got sluggish, I saw a Chrome process with 1.4GB memory, killed it, and saw from the “Aw, snap! Something went wrong when displaying this webpage” that the culprit was the Nature article above.
My guess is that this page (and other offenders) run a Javascript with a memory leak.
My machine is infected with the pwwysydh.com virus. I would like to know if it is the culprit before blaming nature.com, et al. Anyone masochistic enough to help me run this experiment? From Chrome, click the Nature.com link, glance at the page, let the tab sit for a half-hour or more and see if it’s consuming huge memory.
(Suggestions of how to rid myself of pwwysydh.com are also welcome. The standard free anti-malware packages are no help; is there a for-sale anti-malware that will do the job?)
I was having really serious memory problems with Firefox recently, and I was blaming YouTube for a while as it seemed to happen after watching a few videos. But it turned out to be AdBlock Plus. I have replaced it with uBlock and it’s been fine ever since.
And just now I experienced the problem with a page at politifact.com. And I could see that the pwwysydh.com virus had infected that page. Was I just not paying much attention before, or has the pwwysydh.com virus become more malignant?
Perhaps I should Pit those eager to blame reputable websites when they’ve not bothered to rid their computers of known viruses. :smack:
I’ve never understood this push for individual apps. Every goddam web site has an app they want me to download! I get why THEY want me to, but why would I want to? In order to make their content usable? That’s what I expect from a browser - the ONE piece of software I should need to read a web page.
While we’re on that, I’m currently fuming because my favored web browser has been ditched by its developer. And with the “arms race” of new features on web sites it’s just a matter of time before its unusable. Which sucks, because it has a combination of features unavailable in other browsers. I’ve tried about a dozen new ones lately and always run back to my terminal-case friend.
I’ve said before in other threads, I see myself as the computer version of William F. Buckley - I stand athwart “progress” and shout STOP!!!
In any case, I would recommend that you start using the free version of WinPatrol. It lets you know whenever a new program has been installed on your computer. https://www.winpatrol.com/mydownloads/
(Scroll down about halfway.)
Thank you. I’ve already downloaded the free versions of both Zemana and SpyHunter. One or both implied they would remove my virus if I upgraded to the paid version. Maybe I’d better stop being such a cheapskate!
Your 2nd link supposedly gives manual removal instructions, but they are difficult or impossible to follow. (Trying to follow them is how, due to my own blunder, I lost my saved passwords, etc.) For example
“Navigate to %windir%/system32/Drivers/etc/host”
I can find several folders with similar name, but no etc/host anywhere (unless it’s marked hidden).
It’s gotten better, though. I used to never use Chrome because I use YouTube a lot, and every time I would bring up a new video, Chrome would hold onto the memory from the previous video. But it doesn’t do that any more.
)