Youtube performance (or lack thereof) since last major UI update

[Puiu]

I've been struggling to find the cause of some really annoying major slowdown of the youtube website. It has huge input lag and everything takes ages to load with big CPU usage spikes.

The front page has always been problematic since I have hundreds of subscriptions so the left side menu has a lot to load (something I find to be entirely BS in terms of UI design), but now I can barely scroll the list and video feed is also slow to scroll and load.

I've tested youtube vs hooktube with the same videos at the same 720p quality. If it hovers at around 10-12% while playing in hooktube, the same video runs at 20-25% while playing on youtube. And if I interact with the UI elements of youtube (video controls, side panel scrolling, comments loading) I can see spikes of 40-60% and the entire website acts like it freezes. Clicking a button or another video can take seconds to register.

I've noticed that when I log out the input lag is less pronounced while watching a video, but it still very problematic.

Both Chrome, Firefox and Edge act the same (although Edge is a bit better but mostly because it's more clean since I barely use it).

Is anyone else experiencing problems like this?

 

[DavidBailey]

Close the left menu.
I do.
Try 240P instead of 720P.
I do.
If I want to see better quality I use my YouTube Downloader & watch videos on WMP.
Mostly 1080P quality.
Smooth playing with no lags.
I use Opera.
When things slow down I close Opera & use CCleaner to clean it out & resume what I was doing.

 

[Puiu]

I don't think you understood. It's not the video playback that is problematic, it's the website itself. I already have an add-on that adds a button to open any youtube video directly into Potplayer (no download required). And it should have been pretty clear that clearing cookies and cache was not a solution since I used relatively clean browsers to tests besides the main one, Chrome.

I'm not exactly a beginner at such things, CCleaner is my bread and butter for when I repair PCs.

I'm more interested in seeing if others also got some of these problems after youtube update the UI and if they found some solutions that don't require me to use other software/websites. Autoplay doesn't work on those and many other features.

 

[DavidBailey]

No problems on my end.
"Clean" browsers can clog up quickly & need cleaning.

 

[DelJo63]

Youtube home page loads quickly for me

 

[Puiu]

Youtube home page loads quickly for me

Do you have a lot of subscriptions? I have around 700.

 

[DelJo63]

Do you have a lot of subscriptions? I have around 700.

If you mean RSS Feed, not really - - just a handful

 

[mailpup]

I think the OP means YouTube channel subscriptions.

 

[DelJo63]

I think the OP means YouTube channel subscriptions.

which is why I qualified my response. As I'm no fanboy of social media of any form, it's easy to guess with 100% accuracy that I would have ZERO youtube presence or interest - - that's just me.

If youtube subscriptions are accessed with every home page login and there are 100s, then it's easy to anticipate that access would be terrible at all times.

 

[MaikuTech]

I think the OP means YouTube channel subscriptions.

No he isn't it sounds like more of a browser internet connection problem.
If you wanted to why not ask him to run a ping test to youtube, vimeo, dailymotion ?

 

[DavidBailey]

Pings---

 

[mailpup]

No he isn't it sounds like more of a browser internet connection problem.
If you wanted to why not ask him to run a ping test to youtube, vimeo, dailymotion ?

I'm commenting on post #6.

 

[Puiu]

It's not the internet guys
Just to make it more clear to some who didn't read the first post. This is a problem with the new UI that youtube "upgraded" to a few months ago. Compared to before it has a few new features that I like, but it is loading so many scripts that it feels incredibly sluggish. Everything feels like it is working in slow-mo. And this is just an youtube problem as the rest of the websites I frequently visit don't have any issues at all (including script heavy websites like twitch).

 

[MaikuTech]

I'm commenting on post #6.

=/

Pulu if you think it is just come back to youtube in 2 days and find out for sure, whenever youtube does this I always find the problem on the browser itself.
A good flush of the browser cache and history might do it some good.

 

[Puiu]

Puiu I don't think its subscriptions either I have only a few and sometimes it lags in opening home page, I used to quick click now I click something I didn't want because the page didn't load! Anyway, I figured its the VPN addon I had messing with proxy so check your add-ons.

I've replaced my adblock plus addon with uBlock Origin and managed to gain some performance back. mind you, it's still not as good as before the UI update they made in 2017. it has some really weird JS for loading its elements which are very CPU heavy and everything feels sluggish. completely different from, let's say, Twitch which is very snappy for me. it's at least more manageable now.