Newsblur slowdown/crashes on chrome

Newsblur is on of my primary applications. It is open most of the time in a tab in my browser (Chrome on Linux).

But regularly it becomes unresponsive (clicks take 5+ seconds to get acted upon) or crashes. Slowdowns occur several times daily, crashes maybe once. After a crash I can restart it and it comes up again just fine. But it is an annoyance.

Are there and things I can do to collect information to debug this issue ?

I’m running chrome 27 on RHEL 6.3.

5 Likes

I’m not sure, since I don’t experience these slowdowns. Can you list all of the extensions your browser has installed?

Here the complete list:

Adblock Plus 1.6.1
Google Calendar Checker (by Google) 1.4.0
Google Chrome to Phone Extension 2.3.3
Google Docs 0.5
Hex Empire : Killing by Numbers 1.0.0.5
Hide Elements 1.1
Open Reddit NSFW Links in Incognito Window 0.9.1
Panel View for Keep 1.8
Personal Blocklist (by Google) 2.4.1
Proxy SwitchySharp 1.10.2
reddit companion 1.1.2
WarLight 1.0

Unfortunately the slowdowns are irregular. It sort of feels like garbage collection happening from time to time.

I haven’t noticed any slowdown on a stock Chrome, so it may be an extension. It’s unlikely to be a GC, since that would only take a few hundred milliseconds.

I get this often. The more I use a Newsblur tab in Chrome, the more RAM it consumes. I’m not up on all the technical stuff but it’s almost like everything it caches stays in RAM until the tab closes. It’s not uncommon for my Newsblur tab to be using over 1GB RAM.

The solution is simple though - I close the tab and reopen Newsblur in a new tab. The caching problem still exists but it’ll reset the RAM count to zero. I do this once a day and it works fine.

Can you just reload the tab instead of close and re-open? Anyway, that sounds like a memory leak. I’ll have to take a look soon.

Good news, I looked deep into the issue (thank you to jury duty for providing many hours of time to work on this kind of bug) and fixed 99% of NewsBlur’s memory leaks. There still exists a small one, but I’m not yet convinced it’s a memory leak.

1 Like

Is there a way I can enable/configure a detailed debug log for Newsblur ?

This would allow for post-mortem analysis. When I notice it slowing down I could grab the log and see what caused it.

Just let me know. That sort of logging is not exposed, and I can figure it out if I know the symptoms.

@Samuel: This happens on Windows, without any extensions.
Here is a report on this:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/iss…

Same happens here if I scroll blogs like “The Caveman Circus”. The memory just adds up and the process gets fatter. Don’t know if you can fix this on the website or it’s a Chrome issue.
Well, I think it’s a Chrome issue, but I doubt Google will ever fix it.

Apparently the last Chrome update fixed it, at least for Windows anyway. Memory usage goes up when using the site, then drops back again soon after, so it doesn’t keep building up.

No, it’s the same. Just tested it yesterday. Check the report I linked and your version number. Well, I mean, stable version number. Since my client is also the same version 31 like the reporter’s. So yeah.

I don’t think it will ever get fixed.
I myself have a dozen of reported bugs, and none of them got even looked at.

Firefox is even worse. Check the bugtracker. It’s doom, pain and suffering inside.
Like Gnome’s project tracker. (Which is even more of a joke.)

Hell, there is not even a class I could put these, they are ALL horrible.
An open-source project got an excuse, but Chrome and Firefox is just… sad.
(Firefox gets a crapload money, which they indeed burn all the time for stupid things like Australis, the Firefox OS project… but yeah, they have money.)

I have this issue everyday on my Mac and Linux machines, both on the latest Chrome versions.

I can only read 10-15 articles at a time anymore before having to kill the tab and reload it in Chrome. This has been going on for months now. Any indication that anything at all is going to be done about it?

Brian, what extensions do you have installed? Guaranteed it’s one of those.

Well I have 10 or so installed. I deactivated them all and started to turn them on one at a time to try to isolate it. And it would appear having ANY extensions turned on is what causes the problems with Newsblur? That seems… lame.

The worst one appeared to be Reddit Enhancement Suite, though, for reference.

But I guess that means time to find a new RSS site.

It seems lame that just using extensions completely kills the usability of this site.

I have 14 extensions turned on and Newsblur works fine for hours and hundreds of articles in Chrome.

I wouldn’t be so quick to assume all your extensions are perfect and it’s the Newsblur application that’s the issue.

It’s just one of them. In the past it’s been the Adblock extension, but all you have to do is turn off the extension for newsblur.com. It shouldn’t be an issue otherwise.

Ok well here’s my list.
One (or some combination of these) is what is killing my usage of the site:

* - rarely used and usually disabled

23++ *
AdBlock
Check All
Enhanced Steam
Hola Better Internet *
Last.fm scrobbler
Murdoch Block
myPlex Queue Extension
Postman - REST Client
reddit companion *
Reddit Enhancement Suite
Tampermonkey
trakt.tv Everywhere *

So all told, that’s 9 extensions I have enabled usually and it’s some combo of them that’s killing my Newsblur experience.

Anyone have any insight into which one it might be?
My one-by-one testing made it seems like RES and myPlex might be the worst ones.

And because it was driving me crazy I looked into it more. It is really starting to appear that the problem is the Tampermonkey scripting extension. Once I disabled that and left everything else running, I’ve been able to work through my newsblur queue without too much slowdown.