Macosxhints.com causes excessive processor-load

[larsskovgaard]

I have noticed that, when viewing macosxhints.com in Camino, Firefox or Safari, that I have to keep an eye on the browsers cpu-activity. If I leave a tab open with macosxhints, the browser will use more and more of the processors resources until the computer becomes more or less unusable. I just closed a tab with the site in Firefox, and had CPU-use drop from 55-60% to 5-8%.

If I hadn't checked this myself in more than one browser, I would have blamed Firefox. However, as I said, it is the same in Safari and Camino.

I would like to know if anyone else has experienced similar issues, and if someone might know what the reason is. For now, I just make it a habit to close the active tab when I'm done reading.

Just for the record: I'm a big fan of this site, and read most of the hints with great interest, and this is by no means meant to be critizism of the site. ;)

// Lars

[robot_guy]

I imagine you're encountering Flash-based banner ads. Some of those are impressively CPU-hungry, like the Macworld ad with birds flying by in the background while a newspaper vending box says Feed Me Feed Me (that one spiked my Activity Monitor's Dock icon CPU meter).

[larsskovgaard]

I just checked by looking at the page-source and locating the link for the banner-ad (same one you mentioned, by the way...). I then added the server ad.doubleclick.net to my /etc/hosts file by adding a line at the bottom with the following:

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net

Then I reloaded the page (and got an error-message from the local apache-server instead of the flash-banner) – but cpu-usage dropped from around 70% to 3% for Firefox... nice!!!

(I know the banner-ads help pay for the site, so I won't recommend this as a solution ...but it's nice to know why, at least!).

Thanks! :)

// Lars

[robot_guy]

(I know the banner-ads help pay for the site, so I won't recommend this as a solution ...but it's nice to know why, at least!).

You could always let the page and ad load, then switch to Thread Tools-->Show Printable Version, which won't have any ads.

[ThreeDee]

Firefox - AdBlock Plus (http://adblockplus.org/en/) (Use EasyList when asked for block list)

Safari - PithHelmet (http://www.culater.net/software/PithHelmet/PithHelmet.php) (built-in filters work fine)

Camino - Built-In (Prefs>Web Features>Block Web Advertising)

[maclova]

I don't myself understand why the owner(s) here insist on using such a untargeted ad network (that requires them to work so that they only get the right kind of ads on the site), when a much less system intensive and not so visually intrusive ad network Google Adsense would be a much simpler and easier alternative for all of us, it automatically targets the ads based on the content of the sites it's displayed on and since it's either text based and/or still image based there isn't any risk of it being processor hungry like some of these flash ads...really...they should at least give Google Adsense a try, I think they'd be quite happy with it over their current ad network, especially when they realize how it requires no work to dispense targeted ads :)