Saw the window was a bit laggy so thought I'd delve deeper to figure out what was going on.
This lib runs a a RAF animation loop every 8ms across every component on the page that causes the entire document to repaint.
The comment above appears of the AI generated sort: // One shared animation frame: step every live component, park when idle. // The delta is capped so a background-tab pause never becomes one giant step.
The "JellyEngine" instead of just calculating the jelly animation on pointer events is recalculating for every active component on the page every frame.
This is the kind of thing usually a human notices and says 'dont do that, that is kind of crazy'.
Running a performance profile in Chrome doesn't back this up for me, and looking at the loop it looks like it maintains an active `Set<JellyComponent>()` of which components to update, and clears them out when they stop moving.
Agreed the comments look a bit slop-ish but I don't see anything obviously wrong with its approach, and the core loop is running in microseconds for me when nothing is happening.
Here's the perf profile, just to clarify.
Cursor idle, viewport on the button examples. 3ms repaint every 8-11ms. Animation frame points to the code i mentioned.
https://postimg.cc/sQpZxxzv
The problem isn't doing work on a website, its if you have an idle task that is taking up a significant portion of the frame budget then its easy to have frame drops when you do significant work like clicking, scrolling, browsing.
Idle work showing up in flamecharts is usually the thing to be cautious of.
That's from Lottie, the animations that play in the header and footer of the page. Shrink your window until they disappear and try again.
Oh, yea, "you're holding it wrong"
? In this very particular case, yeah, the original commenter was holding it wrong, as they inspected the wrong thing. People sometimes hold things wrong and it's okay.
Is it? I am in the middle of the page, the header and footer are well off into the distance not being rendered, and I see the same pattern.
https://imgur.com/texxYP0
Zoom in, take a look at what code is running, and you'll see it's all `lottie_light.min.js`. Being offscreen doesn't mean it's doing nothing. In fact, it looks like once it shows once it keeps spinning its RAF loop forever. Shrink your window so it disappears, reload, and then profile.
> This is the kind of thing usually a human notices and says 'dont do that, that is kind of crazy'.
It's not crazy. That is literally what 99.99% of video games do. They repaint everything constantly, only limited by either your vsync rate or hardware.
A website shouldn't be pinning CPU or GPU. When people run a game they expect some sort of battery drain. People don't expect that some websites will thrash your CPU/GPU like a game.
> A website shouldn't be pinning CPU or GPU.
That's exactly what I was saying. Rendering a few widgets shouldn't pin your CPU or GPU because it's so little work.
This page, however, has an animated SVG and moving DOM elements in the header which consume far more resources than the widgets it is trying to showcase. Compare usage before and after deleting the header element (`section.hero`) in the inspector to see for yourself.
> > A website shouldn't be pinning CPU or GPU.
> That's exactly what I was saying. Rendering a few widgets shouldn't pin your CPU or GPU because it's so little work.
Your comment doesn't say this at all:
> > This is the kind of thing usually a human notices and says 'dont do that, that is kind of crazy'.
> It's not crazy. That is literally what 99.99% of video games do. They repaint everything constantly, only limited by either your vsync rate or hardware.
Am I missing something? Are you referring to some other part of the thread?
Sorry, I meant to say that it was what I was suggesting. Video games render a lot more than the widgets on that website. Rendering less takes less time, so your `requestAnimationFrame` loop idles longer between executions waiting for vsync, which means your CPU or GPU usage is not pinned.
> Yes my car is running all night while it stands in front of my house, but it's not really a waste of resources or a nuisance because generators do the same thing.
It's mining Bitcoin!
Presumably in a video game the majority of the screen changes every frame. Not so in web pages.
My point was more that rendering a few widgets at 60+ FPS is nothing for anything with a GPU, and everything has a GPU these days.
Anyway, something like this only needs to paint when states change or animations are running. That's an easy optimization to make here if it doesn't do it already. And games don't even bother with it, they repaint all UI even if it doesn't change.
Waste the cycles, everyone has too many cycles, is it even waste if the cycles would just go unused, GPUs are expensive, they better do their bit, who's got no GPU, go play somewhere else without your GPU, pal. It's all a game, anyway.
Point being: your comment made me sad and I needed to lighten myself up a bit.
Yes, visual effects and animations in UIs burn cycles just to make it look nicer. Doesn't matter if it's a website or the native system UI.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's fine to constantly render when you know nothing changed. I'm saying the load from this should be very small. Most of the performance issues from this page are actually from the header animation, which you can delete in the inspector to see a significant drop in usage (mine went from ~35 to ~6.6 CPU).
Video games only get away with this because their energy draw is obvious: one launched the video game, so one expects the power draw. Visiting a web page does not have that action-reaction causality in people’s minds. Having a random web page introduce maximally-inefficient repaints also leads browsers to start reducing timeslices — especially those with any sort of power drain cognizance, such as Safari — which, here, leads to hella janky animations that can’t cope without their inefficient repaint loop.
All this work to replicate the animated blobbiness of Liquid Glass. I thought everyone hated it! So, then, why is this a thing?
> Visiting a web page does not have that action-reaction causality in people’s minds
It does in my mind. I fully expect visiting any of reddit.com, github.com, notion.so, or meet.google.com to have the chance to pin a cpu core at 100% for as long as the site is open.
At this point, I expect the average webpage to use more CPU than any of the video games I play. The only reason I had to upgrade to my current machine is because a 2021 CPU (intel gen 11) wasn't capable of running notion.so or google meet anymore, it still ran all the video games I care about just fine.
As a web developer, I am not included in the perception difference I describe. I am also 0.000001% and not a representative sample of People As A Whole Or Even As A Majority Or Significant Fraction. So while my personal awareness is akin to yours, extrapolating from that towards the masses is a dead end exercise.
CPU bound games examples: Chess, Go, Final Fantasy XIV, Elite Dangerous, and any competent Civilization / 4X or turn-based strategy game. Yes, you can dial up the graphics on these to force them to be GPU bound, but they’re each CPU bound in their own unique ways. Perhaps none such games appeal to you, but as with above, extrapolating from personal preferences is a non-starter.
Non-tech people teach each other to force-quit apps to stop their battery drain. Websites aren’t apps, so their phone ‘randomly’ gets hot sometimes and they either have no idea why or just try closing all tabs in a vague hope that it works. Sometimes a webpage uses up all their data for the month downloading ads and so they stop using the web over cellular at all.
This is the baseline level of competence that improving the web must be aiming for — not ‘web developers will understand that the tab is using lots of battery and must be closed’. Making the web better is not about making the web significantly more battery-hungry, no matter how pretty it might seem. No visual advancement in radio button UX is worth a continuous repaint in JavaScript.
If the geneva convention didn't ban torture, I'd say that web-developers should be forced to actually try and use the apps they develop.
The websites I mentioned use more cpu and memory than most games in Civilization the series, which are largely competently developed. My previous laptop could play civ 5 at a higher framerate than it could scroll github diffs or notion pages. Civ 5 handled full-speed keyboard input, while notion doesn't let me input text at my roughly 100 wpm typing speed.
I agree that we shouldn't be expecting users to figure out how to close the right tab, however I'm reporting the way things currently are, which is that webpages are poorly optimized messes.
They should also be forced to walk around town with a GDPR cookie banner pasted over their face covering half of their field of view. And then although automatic doors open for most people, for them specifically, the automatic doors shut. The doors are postered with "would you like to subscribe" newsletter ads. They have to manually open each one of them.
This is like saying "I fully expect visiting that neighborhood to have the chance of getting mugged." A true statement and an incredibly sad one.
Is your browser running the javascript event loop on the GPU? Because mine isn't
The state of the web when you want to compare a website to the most intensive thing a pc can do.
A website isn’t a videogame
The browser and OS does that as well (unless absolute zero updates and you don't even move your pointer around).
But many smaht people out there don't know that.
This is just plain false. Retained UIs like the DOM and what your OS uses only ever render when something changes, so the vast majority of the time they sit idle. There's extensive effort throughout the entire stack to do as little work as possible.
For instance, the mouse cursor is composited on the GPU during scanout. That means simply moving your cursor requires zero rendering.
Another example: When typing only the newly typed character and caret are rendered. The rest of your entire screen is reused.