Ads killing my browser

[Capaill]

Hi,

for the last 1-2 weeks I've noticed huge slowdowns in my browser when I have 2 or more tabs of Techspot open. Even 1 tab open causes 50% CPU load. It seems that Kaspersky antivirus is doing continuous scans and my CPU is maxing out, to the point where I struggle to type comments. This happens in both Firefox and IE. I also got warnings that the Shockwave plugin had crashed.

Today I installed the uBlock Origin addon for Firefox and I can now open multiple Techspot tabs and my CPU is a comfortable 10% used, even with many other applications open.

I don't like taking this action but the site is near unuseable without it. I cannot change my antivirus as it's a company PC.

Have you made any recent changes to how ads work that might be causing this? I've never had this before and often had 5-10 tabs open for different Techspot articles.

 

[Julio Franco]

Thanks for your feedback @Capaill. We haven't made any changes to how ads are served but the behavior you're seeing certainly worries me. The part about Kaspersky loading up makes me wonder if the antivirus is to blame or the ads are. Evidently if the ads are not loaded, the AV is not scanning, however I have ads running normally here without any slowdown.

Would you mind sharing your location with me via private messages? That could help me narrowing down the problem.

Thanks!

 

[Julio Franco]

I looked into this and my conclusion for the time being is that the IT team in your company have applied rules that cause the CPU usage spike, possibly a infinite loop of sorts against the ad serving, so there's little we can do to prevent it.

So on the upside, it's not a generalized issue, which is good On the downside, this kind of thing can happen and ad block is a necessary measure. We definitely don't want anyone to have such a poor user experience when visiting TechSpot.

Thanks again for reporting this.

 

[Capaill]

Thanks Julio.