Launching YouTube Causes Massive CPU Overload

[German_EE]

Google and/or Youtube appear to have changed something in the last couple of days. Just opening a Youtube page (without playing a video) causes one CPU to hit 100% and stay there, turning the PC into a room heater.

Any idea what is causing this and how I can fix it? Both affected systems are running Ubuntu Linux and the latest version of Palemoon. I tried disabling hardware acceleration in Palemoon but it didn't make a difference.

[andersm]

I have not seen anything like that. Try opening the web developer tool, and record a performance trace. You may have gotten some cryptocurrency mining Javascript from somewhere (malicious advert, malware etc.)

[TheAmmoniacal]

Computer specifications? You could firefox or Chrome to see if Palemoon is at fault.

[sleemanj]

Try in an incognito tab.

[rdl]

I use Pale Moon and haven't seen anything unusual. Try installing NoScript and have it block everything on their site except youtube.com and googlevideo.com

Install also, uBlock Origin if you don't already have it or similar.

[German_EE]

Fixed, I spent a few hours working my way through Google searches and eventually found one that mentioned a problem with the content-prefs.sqlite file in the browser profile. Once this was deleted things got back to normal.

Odd how the same issue hit two different PCs running two different versions of browser 

[Rick Law]

Google and/or Youtube appear to have changed something in the last couple of days. Just opening a Youtube page (without playing a video) causes one CPU to hit 100% and stay there, turning the PC into a room heater.
...

I am seeing some odd things on youtube of late also.  Not just the last couple of days but around last 7 days.  I am on a Andriod TV box and I do not have CPU load displaying tool.  It is just some odd behavior and I don't know if it caused excess CPU load.  The odd thing I am seeing is the screen going blank for a second or so and HDMI seem to reconnect (HDMI channel number displayed on screen).  I am not seeing that on my non-HDMI device such as andriod phone or laptop.

My assumptions are:
(option 1) they may have added some digital rights protection stuff that re-check the box is connected to HDMI with proper rights-protection, or
(option 2) I got a software virus sitting in my box, or,
(option 3) youtube is doing some new data collection and founding out what things are connected to the box.

[SiliconWizard]

Dunno. On windows 7 / Firefox I didn't notice anything much, it works fine here.

On Linux / Firefox, the Youtube player has been a disastrous experience for a few months now though (used to work absolutely fine before that). Usually the trigger is to use any control in the embedded player (so if you touch nothing, it plays fine), such as going forward or backward. It tends to suddenly take 100% CPU and make the player become unresponsive. You get out of it either by killing the associated process (fortunately - or unfortunately depending on your views on that - Firefox now spans a myriad of separate processes for everything), or letting Firefox figure out the script is unresponsive, and let it kill it.

So I often use VLC on Linux to watch Youtube videos - it plays them fine and with much less resource usage, and no problem with controlling the video.
I suppose it should on Windows as well. So if you keep having issues with the embedded player, I'd suggest using VLC instead, at least while the problem is still there.

One benefit is that since you need to cut and paste the videos URLs in VLC (it doesn't embed a Youtube browser), you waste a lot less time binge watching.
(There is a Firefox extension to directly play a Youtube video in VLC from Firefox, but then you don't get the above benefit.)

[NiHaoMike]

I use mpv, has more options for tweaking the upscaler for a decent GPU, in my case a GTX 970. (Utilization about 30% after careful tweaking for best subjective quality.)

[raptor1956]

Google and/or Youtube appear to have changed something in the last couple of days. Just opening a Youtube page (without playing a video) causes one CPU to hit 100% and stay there, turning the PC into a room heater.

Any idea what is causing this and how I can fix it? Both affected systems are running Ubuntu Linux and the latest version of Palemoon. I tried disabling hardware acceleration in Palemoon but it didn't make a difference.

I've been seeing the same thing for a week or more.  Just launching Chrome, even with no open tabs, can cause the fans in my high end PC to go to max and in the Task Manager in the 'Process' tab and under the 'Power usage' and 'Power usage trend' columns the indication, which should be 'low' or 'very low' will be reading 'high' or 'very high' -- and again, that's with no tabs open, just Chrome.  The problem is often most acute when YouTube is running within Chrome.

My guess is Google or Microsoft or both have further amped up there spying/telemetry and even on a high end PC the result is high CPU usage, fans blaring at max rpm, and impacts to operation as the system prioritizes spying over work.  This shit is getting out of hand but who exactly is to blame is above my paygrade.  It would be nice if some good software types would look into this and point fingers.


Brian

[MyHeadHz]

They change things all the time, but lately the rate of change has been accelerating.  The best way to avoid it is to force the basic html version instead of the default.  That should work as long as that's still an option.