Opera 38 beta - significant performance issues

[toyo]

toyo last edited by

Hello,

I updated my Opera to latest Beta, and I started having some issues I don't remember from Opera 37 beta. It is a bit hard to pinpoint them, but what I did observe is:

• page load times increase, the more visual stuff on pages the harder they load. Sometimes this results on big CPU spikes, I've seen up to 80-90% CPU if I open 2-3 tabs in the background, which used to be much less intensive.
  Page loading on Edge is meanwhile very good and definitely accelerated, at least partially, as there's no stutter and all is smooth.
• once loaded, performance seems back to normal; during the page load, page scrolling is very choppy and it gets stuck often
• youtube videos sometimes stop/stutter, especially noted on 60 fps ones, but not all. Youtube would ask me about interruptions sometimes, with a button to learn more etc. "Stats for nerds" would sometimes show AVC1/mp4 instead of the usual VP9/WEBM Youtube started to serve, but it doesn't seem to be GPU accelerated and has even worse performance than the VP9 streams ran entirely on the CPU. This issue might have been on Youtube end, as I didn't have issues today and videos are back to WEBM/VP9. I cannot reproduce this anymore, but it did happen, maybe not Opera-related however.

PC spec: FX 8350/stock, GTX 970, 8 GB DDR3, Windows 10 x64 Pro. The PC is clean, healthy. Microsoft Edge runs flawlessly, even 4K Youtube videos. Latest drivers/BIOS are installed, the OS is updated.

In case it helps:
Opera GPU page (notice errors at the end): http://pastebin.com/6bdxL0aT
Chrome (stable) GPU page: http://pastebin.com/CH9Sr60A
Chrome 53 x64 GPU page: http://pastebin.com/wfN9DVpx

[toyo]

toyo last edited by

Nobody has any opinion on this? The difference in performance is pretty high compared to older version. If you open 2-3 background pages, you can't scroll on them and even click for 3-5 seconds. I expect that the performance hit is less for more modern CPUs with very good single thread performance like Skylake or Haswell, but you really expect gamer CPUs on all Opera users for a nice experience?

More importantly, Chrome or Edge do NOT have this issue, at all.

I took a screenshot of the CPU spikes:
http://i.imgur.com/95arKwa.png

The spikes you see cause the scrolling and sometimes the link interactivity to freeze, virtually rendering the page useless until the CPU is done with whatever is doing. There's nothing else that can cause it, I don't have any antivirus or other interfering software installed, and again, other browsers do not suffer from such issues one bit.

Another thing I did was take an Octane test. While some categories were quite normal, a few others got very low scores compared to other browsers, specifically:

• MandreelLatency (Compiler Latency)
• pdf.js (Strings&arrays)
• GB Emulator (Virtual Machine)

Opera Beta 38 score is quite low compared to any other browser I have installed.

Sadly, at this point, I'd say the Beta experience is so miserable due to load time freezes and occasional Youtube video playback issues, that I am starting to contemplate removing the browser.

[leocg]

leocg Moderator Volunteer last edited by

Have you tried to disable the adblocker?

[toyo]

toyo last edited by

Have you tried to disable the adblocker?

Hello,

I never had it enabled. I actually went in opera:\flags now and disabled it there as well (all other flags are default), but no effects.

Tried Incognito mode as well so I can bypass addons, but some pages still take 2 seconds before you can click links, graphical intensive sites like twitter are a pretty big pain etc.

By the way, the differences in Octane score are very high, I assume if real pages use such calculations, and they are performed 5-10X slower than in Chrome or Edge, it's just normal that the pages freeze, CPU spikes, and you will have to wait it out.

[leocg]

leocg Moderator Volunteer last edited by

What about hardware acceleration? Have you tried with it disabled?

You can also check with a standalone installation.

[toyo]

toyo last edited by

What about hardware acceleration? Have you tried with it disabled?
You can also check with a standalone installation.

Sorry for the delay.

No hardware acceleration had some effect, but pages still froze quite a bit and in the end I simply decided to try the dev x64 version. Which seems to be working way more smoothly, posting from it now.

Have no idea what in the world could cause such a slowdown.

[Deleted User]

Deleted User last edited by

I'm facing the same problems.

Pages loading time is higher, using scroll makes me shoot my head and almost all the times when page is loading the fun is at full speed. I have the version 38.0.2220.12, and with the earlier version everything went fine! I'm considering to say goodbye to opera beta

[toyo]

toyo last edited by

I'm facing the same problems.
Pages loading time is higher, using scroll makes me shoot my head and almost all the times when page is loading the fun is at full speed. I have the version 38.0.2220.12, and with the earlier version everything went fine! I'm considering to say goodbye to opera beta

For some reason the Beta seems to rely more on the CPU for very simple operations like page loading. The freezing, at least in my case, is definitely cause by CPU spikes (see images above). The Dev Opera (v. 39) helped a bit, but there are still spikes.

Worse, graphically intense pages (many small videos/pics) are still very bad and at this time I simply have to switch to Edge for smooth scrolling.

I hope this gets remedied, I was just getting to like Opera again after a years long hiatus when they ditched the old engine.