1605513 - Slashdot tab has consistently high energy impact (score of >19)

Status: NEW

(Core :: Performance: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Victor Escobar]

Attachment: slashdot tab.PNG

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.79 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Browse to https://slashdot.org
2. Stay on homepage or click on any article
3. Pull up Firefox Task Manager and notice that the Slashdot tab shows Medium energy impact, with a score of 19 or greater
4. All other tabs/addons have scores of 2 or lower

Actual results:

Slashdot has a disproportionate impact even when it's not in focus. I will use my laptop and periodically check back to see if the energy score goes down. It does not. Relevant specs:

Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 laptop with 12GB RAM and 1TB HDD (50% free space)
Windows 10 Home 64-bit 1909
Firefox 71.0 64-bit

Anything else the devs need from me? Logs? &c.

Expected results:

What is causing Slashdot to be such a resource hog?

Comment 1

[Daniel Kolsis]

Hello, after performing some tests I have noticed that, indeed, slashdot.org does have a higher energy impact than some other popular websites while the tab is selected. I've also compared the energy impact that this site has on Firefox vs Google Chrome and it seems to have a slightly higher impact on Firefox.
I'll set the component to Performance. If, however, you deem this to be incorrect, please adjust the field as you see fit.

Comment 2

[Victor Escobar]

Thank you, Daniel! Changing the component value to 'performance' is fine with me.

Happy holidays!

Comment 3

[Andrew Creskey [:acreskey]]

(In reply to Daniel Kolsis from comment #1)

Hello, after performing some tests I have noticed that, indeed, slashdot.org does have a higher energy impact than some other popular websites while the tab is selected. I've also compared the energy impact that this site has on Firefox vs Google Chrome and it seems to have a slightly higher impact on Firefox.
I'll set the component to Performance. If, however, you deem this to be incorrect, please adjust the field as you see fit.

Daniel, how was the energy impact compared to Chrome? I
'm told that our Energy Impact is based on scheduled events, and is not likely to be comparable to Chrome.
But maybe it was measured in another manner?

As a general means to reduce energy usage, enabling strict tracking protection or an ad blocker should be helpful.

Comment 4

[Daniel Kolsis]

Hi, as Chrome doesn't have a similar energy impact sampler, I've resorted to a more general approach; the Mac Activity Monitor has an Energy Impact score for opened application. Due to it not tracking each browser tab, I've opened only one tab open in both Chrome and Firefox, both with clean profiles, and opened the slashdot website on both browsers. Firefox's energy impact from the Activity Monitor was always higher.
As I see it, after reading your comment on the matter, this was probably not the best approach for this case, considering that Firefox's Energy Impact sampler from the about:performance screen is very different than Mac OS's Activity Monitor. I went this far just to make sure that slashdot is the problem and not Firefox itself.

Comment 5

[Andrew Creskey [:acreskey]]

Perhaps this can be collected under a meta energy impact bug? (sorry, I don't know if there is one)