rylan

FT basically became unusable for me over the past couple days. My computer at home it just kills my browser... both Firefox and Chrome. Slows to a crawl with high CPU usage. Seems to be malicious or bad ads.

My work computer is brand new ultra high end and it even slows down and the cpu maxes out. Whatever changed has made it so I won't be using the site until this is fixed. Loading a page sits there for minutes while my system stalls.

gobluetwo

Glad others are posting this because I'm having the same issues with Chrome and FF. In chrome, it's "secure.adnxs.com" which is rendering FT completely unresponsive and jacking up the CPU.

I will be utilizing "workarounds" to access FT until this issue is fixed.

And as an FYI, the first time I tried logging into FT with a brand new laptop (all of 3 hours after initial setup), it ground to a halt. Pretty sure it's the ads/ad provider and not malware that is the issue.

rylan

High network usage as well >5Mbps sustained for over 30 seconds, seems to be an ad trying to push a video.

VickiSoCal

Completely unusable this morning. I loaded an adblocker just so I could come here and tell you about it, otherwise I would not have been able to.

canopus27

I have to say, I'm loving how snappy and responsive FT is, now that I have an ad blocker active.

I really really do want to support FT, and I'm more than happy to display ads to do that - but you have to find an ad partner who can serve ads that don't slow the site down. It sounds as though you're fixing the adnxs problem ... good ... but seriously, even once that's fixed, if the rest of your ads slow the site down as much as I suspect they will, it's going to be awfully hard turn off the adblocker.

This doesn't seem like it should be that hard; just use an ad provider who renders content quickly & efficiently, and doesn't consume gobs of memory & CPU. The ads are fine. Excessive memory & CPU usage is not required, nor acceptable.

IBJoel

Hi guys, I posted this in the other threads mentioning this, but we are aware of the "adnxs" causing the issue and are working on it.

canadiancow

I have my ad blocker configured to allow unobtrusive ads. I think I will leave it like this forever. I'm still getting ads on a bunch of sites, just not on FT. This issue was definitely the straw that broke the camel's (cow's?) back. I should have done this after the first ad played audio on page load.

gobluetwo

Thanks for fixing that other ad issues (secure.adnxs.com). However, FT is still a ridiculous resource hog in Chrome due to the ad scripts. This is FT memory usage with ad blocker turned OFF:


And this is CPU usage with an ad blocker turned on:


The obvious conclusion is that the ad scripts on FT are significantly degrading not only the site user experience, but impacting the overall performance of our machines. This needs to be fixed.

canadiancow

Seems like you already fixed it

gobluetwo

Lol, fair point

Although I am trying to be a good corporate citizen (or something) and respect the wishes of the FlyerTalkerati...

canadiancow

Well, I suspect that tomorrow, Chrome will automatically start blocking a lot of FT's ads (https://blog.chromium.org/2018/02/ho...ing-works.html), so they've got bigger issues now.

Phil Level

I'm also reporting that FT under FireFox 58.0.2 under Win 10 is using almost 6 GB or memory. As soon as I close the FT tab, memory usage returns to normal.

I enabled Ad Block Plus for FT and that seems to keep RAM usage at normal levels.

exactabox

After finding FT nearly impossible to view, due to extremely high resource usage, with Chrome and Firefox, I decided to try the Opera browser. This is freshly installed, and the only tabs open are from FT. The results were a bit ironic...

I run Windows 7 64-bit with 8gb RAM. I do not use ad-blockers (including the one built into Opera), my philosophy is that I can deal with most ads, it's a small price to pay for a (mostly) free internet. But I have never seen any site -- and that includes clickbait garbage sites -- that immediately just run the CPU at nearly 100% and halt my computer, so quickly and consistently as FT.

IBobi

This is likely ad-related; we are going to try some steps today to prove or disprove that.

IBobi

If you have been experiencing this issue, please let us know if it is still occurring as of this post -- we believe we've managed to turn it off.

Thank you,

Paul