Open Source · Microsoft · Tom's Hardware
A suspected YouTube interface bug spikes RAM usage above 7 gigabytes, users report severe lag and frozen tabs
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◌ Single Source
Reports of YouTube freezing browsers and consuming enormous amounts of RAM began spreading across Reddit and browser forums late last week, with developers now pointing to a bug in the platform's interface code that may be trapping browsers in an endless layout recalculation loop.
Key facts
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- That forces the browser to continuously recompute layout geometry, redraw interface elements, and update rendering states, rapidly consuming CPU resources and memory
- A user shared screenshots on Reddit showing CPU cores pinned near maximum utilization while YouTube tabs became nearly unresponsive
- Users across multiple browsers, including Firefox, Brave, and Microsoft Edge, have described videos stuttering, tabs becoming unresponsive, and systems slowing to a crawl while watching YouTube
Summary
Users across multiple browsers, including Firefox, Brave, and Microsoft Edge, have described videos stuttering, tabs becoming unresponsive, and systems slowing to a crawl while watching YouTube. Many of the initial reports blamed YouTube's ongoing war against ad blockers or recent browser updates, as the issues seemed to have first been noticed after a Firefox update. Following investigations, reports Mozilla's emerging from Mozilla’s open-source bug-tracking system, Bugzilla, suggest YouTube's frontend interface logic is the main culprit. According to comments related to the investigation, the interface repeatedly checks whether all buttons fit within the available horizontal space.