person45 wrote: ↑2021-04-22, 22:54
Are you doing something different on youtube compared to average? Are you uploading videos, watching live streams, or typing in chat? If you don't mind, can you narrow down the issue to specific video channels?
I think I read on Reddit that youtube can use experimental code on some users that they test out before releasing it to a wider audience.
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you; I
thought I had but I apparently didn't actually "submit." That's actually a good thing, since I've done a little more testing. But first, I think I'm a very
average YouTube user:
- I've never uploaded anything to YouTube other than regular comments to regular, prerecorded videos.
- I watch livestreams pretty infrequently (once or twice a month?).
- I tried typing in live chat once (and it was in Pale Moon), but the input delay was 10-30 seconds per keystroke, so I gave up.
- I haven't noticed that the problem is limited to specific channels. I'm pretty sure I've run into it when I've watched nothing but a succession of anodyne music videos from different channels, though I admittedly don't do that often enough to have formed a reliable sample.
I tried disabling the eMatrix extension, but I didn't like the results on some non-YouTube sites I regularly visit, so I soon re-enabled it.
I then disabled eMatrix for the entire YouTube scope. (Previously, when eMatrix rules
were enabled for YouTube, everything had been enabled for YouTube
except stuff from globally blacklisted domains like doubleclick.)
I didn't change anything in uBlock Origin. Some of the filter lists I subscribe to may have gotten updated behind the scenes.
Since the eMatrix change, I haven't noticed any hangs, lags, or typing dropouts. YouTube tabs continue to take up a fair amount of RAM and YouTube memory leaks continue to accumulate, but not as quickly as before. (When I close a YouTube tab, more RAM is released than previously, but definitely not all of it. The more YouTube tabs I've opened in a session, the more RAM usage seems to climb, albeit more slowly.)
But precisely because Alphabet/Google runs experiments and changes YouTube code rather frequently, it's hard to know whether anything
I did contributed to the improvement. (Even to a technically illiterate user like me, the frequency with which youtube-dl* breaks and has to be updated is a pretty big indicator of just how often YouTube code gets changed.) Over the past year or so, I've noticed memory bloat and hangs get worse for a time, and then get better again for a time, with no action at all on my part.
Regardless, with no hangs (for now, knock on wood) and slower memory bloat, I'm ready to return to using Pale Moon for my YouTube browsing for the time being. I run the CPU & Memory Usage Statusbar extension, so it's easy to keep an eye on how much RAM Pale Moon is using and when it might be a good time to restart and flush all of the leftover crap from YouTube. If hangs, lags, and typing dropouts start happening again and I can't fix them, I'm going back to Brave for YouTube.
That's all I have for now. If there are any interesting/useful developments on my end, I will try to remember to post about them here.
Off-topic:
*youtube-dl is widely used and relied on by journalists, documentarists, academics, political activists, and lawyers for fair-use purposes. It was pressure from them that caused youtube-dl to be rather quickly reinstated on Github after the RIAA had it taken down. It can also be used to download public-domain material (and it works on a couple hundred sites other than YouTube). In short, it's not just for pirates.