CPU usage higher than expected for nodeBB (on clients)

[qwinter]

I’m looking at the task manager on firefox and nodebb forum takes a lot of CPU even at rest. I can imagine this is because it uses websockets. Do you have a similar experience? This is on linux,with a beefy CPU and GPU. It triggers the fans. I’ve noticed this with other similar apps (I suspect websocket heavy) like circle.so.

If this is an inevitable consequence of ‘modern web’, I guess we’d all have to move to ARM or get used to spinning fans in the background.

Is my experience an outlier?

[phenomlab]

@qwinter said in CPU usage higher than expected for nodeBB (on clients):

Is my experience an outlier?

It might well be I think. I’m not seeing high CPU usage here (KDE Neon user)

[phenomlab]

@qwinter Can you give me an idea of what your Firefox Task Manager looks like ? Here’s mine. Also much the same with Brave, Google Chrome, and Chromium

[qwinter]

@phenomlab

That top entry is a circle.so ‘forum’ that eats CPU for breakfast too.

[phenomlab]

@qwinter Yes, twice that of Sudonix. I know with Chrome there is an old issue where the GPU processes are actually responsible for huge memory usage, and you can stop that by disabling hardware acceleration.

I wouldn’t class NodeBB CPU usage as that high though in my opinion.

Interestly, if you compare this usage to Flarum, it is higher than expected, although my connection to Flarum isn’t logged in - just a guest. As a test, I fired up an incognito session of my site as a guest, and here’s the result

[qwinter]

@phenomlab I think in my case I could see it go down to ‘static website’ levels. Then when I log in, with no other tabs in firefox, task manager says ‘medium’…

Which leads me to think its some websocket hackery keeping the connection alive for the logged in user in the background!

[phenomlab]

@qwinter Yes, although the experience would be very much degraded without websockets.