Problem:
System or applications may become unresponsive.
Running realtime monitoring apps may report ample main memory, GPU memory and CPU resources are available, in extreme cases <maybe> VRAM (GPU memory) might show less available but is not a consistent factor.
Factor:
Web browser running, today likely can be any web browser but today the most affected seems to be Firefox.
Solution:
Disable hardware acceleration in the Browser. On Firefox,
Edit > Preferences > Advanced >Uncheck box for hardware acceleration
Background:
From my current research, current browser technology does not manage resources used by the relatively new HTML5 Canvas element very well. Canvas is a “drawing” feature that enables and supports both 2D and 3D objects to be written, including animations. Historically, particularly 3D animations can produce a significant rendering load, so hardware acceleration can be desirable, but to implement properly requires competent GC which may not exist yet.
Performing widely available benchmarking tests available on the Internet, I have not yet been able to pin-point the exact Canvas technologies that likely are causing problems except for WebGL (no surprise). It may also be related to my personal habit opening 0ver 20 browser tabs and windows during research.
In any case, early investigation results and results from running Benchmark tests consistently show that disabling hardware acceleration in the browser will at least partially mitigate the problem, remains to be seen whether the problem can be or is fully addressed which is doubtful short of refusing to surf HTML5 Canvas sites which is likely impractical.
HTH,
TSU
