If by smoke and mirrors you mean multiple processes that, in the aggregate, thrash the CPU, I noticed something like that yesterday in Brave. I was watching a live YouTube stream (with that ADHD chat feed on the right ), and Brave's processes (two of them accounting for the lion's share) were consistently using over 50% of my CPU cycles. I'm almost certain I never got close to that in Pale Moon's single process.vannilla wrote: ↑2021-04-06, 22:01[T]his issue actually happens in other browsers too, but those browsers hide the fact using smokes and mirrors. * * * Set the cache to the default value: you are actually losing performance regardless of the sites you visit. Use eMatrix or whatever if you want to keep it clean periodically.
I haven't yet tried to check Brave's CPU usage when I'm composing in Gmail, but in Pale Moon I surmised that Gmail's constant "cloud updating" of new input was involved in my Gmail-related hangs. Maybe composition, or some aspect of it, gets split off to a separate process in multi-process browsers.
SIDEBAR: I'm a non-coder, but I have to wonder how long Pale Moon can last as a single-process browser if an increasing number of sites are coded for multi-process with no (or grossly inadequate) fallback provisions for single-process. I imagine that that's the kind of thing that has to be handled on the site coders' end. (Again, though, maybe flushing "zombie blobs" once the tab that loaded them has been closed or unloaded is something that could be done on the browser side, at least for the major offenders.) I'm guessing that a lot of websites are now designed exclusively for Google Chrome and that even Safari and Firefox users are lucky if any special accommodations have been made for them. It's a potential antitrust issue, to my mind, but (sadly) one that is unlikely to gain any traction.
I vaguely recall that I set my cache to zero many months ago to test the possibility that something cache-related was contributing to my hangs. My laptop and Internet connection are relatively fast and I usually have plenty of free RAM, so I didn't really notice a performance hit (except maybe when I reloaded tabs that had been automatically unloaded by Lull The Tabs). I kind of forgot about it and left the cache at zero. I just now reset it to the default automatic cache management and will see how that goes. I expect unloaded tabs will reload a second or so more quickly.
My caveman conclusion is, "Gmail, YouTube, BAD! Hit with club, burn with fire!"
I appreciate your followup!