Source
r/ffxivmeta•
xobs

Banner animation on old.reddit.com causes Firefox to use ~40% CPU

I'm not sure where to post bugreports for r/ffxiv/, and this seems to be the most appropriate place.

I use old.reddit.com rather than reddit.com because it's normally a lot faster. However, /r/ffxiv/ has gotten really slow lately, and I decided to track down why.

I discovered it has to do with the scrolling banner on the top.

As long as the tab with r/ffxiv is visible, Firefox uses a lot of CPU and things generally get sluggish. If I disable the "animation" and "-webkit-animation" properties of the #header div, then then CPU usage of Firefox drops down to 5%. This happens even in Incognito mode with all extensions disabled.

I can make the CPU usage go down by switching to a different tab, however simply scrolling the banner out of view does not reduce usage.

Additionally, blocking the banner with uBlock does not solve the issue -- I have to remove the "animation" and "-webkit-animation" properties in order to improve performance.

Posted Jul 26, 2019, 3:21 AM UTC

119
FFSnipe•

this has been an off and on issue with firefox over the years. and it seems random at that, some people have the problem, some people dont. some versions of FF have it, some dont. theres no telling what the exact issue is, and mozilla cant even pin point it it seems, since it is still around.

this is not something the mods of the XIV sub can... fix. i mean, theres nothing they can do. the CSS is proper as far as i can tell (unless i missed something). this is just something you will have to deal with. i hate saying it like that but its a browser problem, not a FFXIV sub problem...

you could always turn the style off if you want rid of it.

2
xobsOP•

Thanks for the suggestion.

I've disabled custom-theme support (I didn't even know that was an option), which naturally solves the problem. I wasn't sure when the custom-scrolling started, or if anyone else had noticed the problem. But if they do, the solution is to disable the custom r/ffxiv theme.

2
Hakul•

They can fix the banner.

Pretty shitty to lose the entire style because they made a poor choice with an animated banner. And still waiting for the fix to that chromatic aberration, I've had the banner blocked with ublock ever since it went live.

1
FFSnipe•

how can they fix the banner other than making it non-animated though?

i wouldnt call it a poor chose in styling. it is utilizing css that works (or is SUPPOSED to work). its not really their fault if mozilla hasnt pinpointed the issue yet.

1
Hakul•

Making it not animated is indeed a way to fix the issue for users. The only thing that should matter here is that users shouldn't be inconvenienced for something as irrelevant as an animated banner.

If something doesn't work well with one of the two major browsers you don't your hands up in the air and ignore the problem, everything should work well in all major platforms.

Honestly I more often than not defend the mods when people go after them, but with the banner situation it's pretty disappointing they are choosing to ignore all issues, as if it takes much work to fix them. It's been a month since this https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivmeta/comments/c6glq1/new_banner/ and nothing.

1
PixelPharaoh•

That was from a month ago? I get mods are busy but jfc.

1
Mitsuma•

This happens in Chrome as well by the way.
If I have a twitch stream open and FFXIV, I notice some very odd CPU load based stuttering in the stream.

Then I notice I have FFXIV reddit up and its causing the issue.

1
alabombMOD/r/ffxiv mod•

Hey there!

Sorry for the (very late) response on this - We were all really impressed by the winning banner and wanted the entire image to be visible to folks regardless of their resolution, which is where the idea for the animated banner came from. The banner stuttering is an issue that I've been tracking since we updated the banner but I've unfortunately not had any luck in fixing it.

I've been exploring a few alternate options (such as multiple static versions of the banner that are chosen randomly on refresh) to try and find a way to display the entire banner without compromising browser performance and still fitting into reddit's filesize requirements. Unfortunately, IRL's been getting in the way and the banner ended up slipping off my radar for a while.

That being said, it shouldn't have taken us this long to respond to the issue so I do apologize again for that - I've disabled the animation completely for the time being and have replaced the banner image with a version that should be corrected for the chromatic aberration issues that folks were seeing before.

1
Hakul•

I forgot to reply, thank you for the fixes. I think randomly picking a banner would be pretty neat, and the banner is big enough that it can be split into several.

1