Recently I’ve noticed an odd slowdown in my laptop. Primarily in things like typing in a forum - odd pauses and delays in the input being taken from the keyboard, almost feels “laggy” if that makes any sense.
Not seeing it in any other computing functions. Lots of memory free, not seeing any odd cpu chomping processes, etc.
My paranoid self thought “Virus? Keylogger of some type?” but virus check and Malwarebytes come up clean.
Anything that pops to mind that would cause delays or lags in typing in forum messages or similar activitives?
This is usually a browser issue. If IE it’s sometimes solved with a full clear of cache, saved form entries, etc.
If it’s Firefox the recommendation is to usually uninstall add-ons, clear private data, and see if the issue is fixed before adding add-ons back one at a time.
Specific to both issues is that the part which is actually slow, is text entry into a form of some sort.
Thanks for the question and answer, that always happens to me when I’m already in a foul mood, and I don’t think my computer’s come closer to defenestration since the great instant restart video card overheat of 08.
I had a copy of Firefox develop a memory leak lately that was causing the same behavior you’re reporting. If this is only happening in your browser use Chrome and see if that makes it go away. (If you’re already using Chrome I don’t know what to tell you, other than to watch for memory leaks/CPU usage spikes in your other running processes.
That’s a good experiment to run. I’ve got Chrome, I’ll see if there’s a difference.
I also tend to have FF open all day long, so a memory leak is a good hypothesis - I’ll see if the slowdown occurs later in the day vs. when first opened.
The FF memory leak was pretty easy to test in my case. I noticed laggy input in Facebook and kept Task Manager up as I used the site. FF memory usage started at 200MB and steadily rose to 800MB before I killed it, tried the same site in Chrome, and had no trouble.
I likely have a rogue add-on installed, but I’ve warmed up to Chrome greatly since trying it again and haven’t had any reason to troubleshoot FF so far.
You guys weren’t kidding. I just switched to Chrome, and I can’t believe how fast this thing is. And here I thought my internet connection was broken or something.
Yeah it is quick. I wonder, once the add-ons begin ( I read somewhere they were adding add-on support in May) if it will slow down a la FF.
If I just had a couple of addons that I consider must haves (OK - “really likes” vs. must haves) I’d switch and stay. The one thing I need to test about Chrome again is how it deals with sites that require IE. With Firefox, you could always use IE Tab and the site would behave properly - I found a lot of sites that required IE that did not work well with Chrome when I tested it a few months ago.
I use Chrome and I absolutely love it. It’s blazing fast. I actually swapped from Firefox due to a bizarre issue I’ve not been able to solve, even months later. It’s no hardship now, but not being able to fix it has kind of grated on me. May as well toss it in the direction of the hivemind whilst I’m driving by, I guess!
I moved from Firefox 2.0 to Firefox 3. When I was using it, it would start out fine. Then it would take ages to load a page and hang, saying the document contained no data. This would then seem to “spread” and do the same thing to any web page, even on other browsers. if I i didn’t use Firefox, no problems. Naturally I googled this and checked the support wiki, but I couldn’t dig up anything relevant for all the Google-fu in the world. I had a poke round my DNS, my cache, and my minimal plugins, but nothing seemed to make any difference. So I thought fuck it, got Chrome, and never looked back. I’d love to know what’s doing it though.
Try running the portable version of FF from a USB stick and see if it does the same thing. Using OpenDNS if you don’t already may also help with cross-browser issues.
The only thing Chrome is missing for me is an adblocker (not the jury rigged stuff people have come up with so far). Other than that, I have no problem keeping IE handy anyway for sites that require it.
