Opera Browser Woes

April 1, 2008 9:01 PM

Opera Browser Woes. Running Opera on XP, I experience a several-second hang every couple minutes and it's driving me crazy!

I've been an avid user of Opera since 1999 and have been an enthusiastic proselytizer, however, my faith is being shaken. It seems that the releases from 9.0 on have been getting more bloated or less efficient at managing it's computing load. I'm currently running 9.26 after running 9.25 for the last couple months.

In the middle of a typical browsing session, I have 1 window open with 4-8 pages. Things will be running smoothly until all of a sudden I try to make an action, such as switch pages or scroll down the page. Then Opera will go into 'non responding' mode, freeze up, and release after about 10-40 seconds.

Here are things I have done to try to alleviate the problem:

- increase priority of opera with windows task manager
- run a 12Mb ramdisk at boot and use it to store opera memory cache (10Mb)
- opera disk cache is turned off
- try running basic html sites with no javascript (no gmail)
- purge temp files and cache at exit
- deleted private data a couple weeks ago, didn't help
- removed all bookmarks (opera6.adr is 371kb, about 1000 bookmarks)
- turned off cookies, java, javascript, and plugins
- using most recent version of opera
- removed skin (opera's, not mine)
- removed my extensive ad-blocking hosts file

Here are potential culprits:
My notes file is 2.66MB
My laptop hard drive is 4200rpm

However, this happens on pretty much every computer I use Opera on, including desktop comps with faster HDDs and brand new notes files.

FYI, i have 1.5 gb ram on my laptop and use XP Tablet edition SP2.

From my limited use of OperaUSB, I don't think I experience the same issue.

I found the same issue best represented in this thread, but there seems to be no definitive answer.

Does anybody have any experience defeating this invisible annoyance?

posted by sonicbloom to computers & internet (12 comments total)

I use opera on 3 computers and this doesn't happen to me at all. What are the pages you are typically browsing? Customized javascript that is target for Firefox and IE idiosyncrasies could be causing the slowdown.
posted by bigmusic at 9:51 PM on April 1, 2008

Defeating it? No, but I feel your pain. I hit the same exact thing.
posted by unixrat at 10:02 PM on April 1, 2008

bigmusic - I'm usually browsing forums, google searches, ebay items, craigslist postings, mefi FPPs. I do most of my creative web exploring in Opera and do my workhorse web-app stuff in FF.

unixrat - it bites, doesn't it?
posted by sonicbloom at 10:14 PM on April 1, 2008

You might try the newest development build. As I understand it, the developers aren't working to fix any bugs in this version of Opera unles it is security related. So what you are experiencing is probably already fixed in the "in progress" version. The hold up on the new version is related to DHTML support and making sure that they are able to handle all the new ecmascript improvments (Acid 3.)
posted by bigmusic at 10:26 PM on April 1, 2008

This happens to me with Opera Linux, although less frequently, and with the top utility I've been able to trace it to the Flash plugin. That doesn't necessarily mean that's what's going on in your situation and I have no idea how to fix it, but it may help help you in your search. Unless this happens for you with no flash ads/youtube open, in which case I have even less to add.
posted by moift at 10:54 PM on April 1, 2008

Drat, missed the part about your disabling plugins. Did you disable and then restart the browser though? The plugins can stay resident and cause problems without being enabled.
posted by moift at 10:57 PM on April 1, 2008

You might want to get more information on it by viewing Opera's threads in Process Explorer when it hangs, like in this example.

But since the hang is so short, maybe Process Monitor would work better.
posted by frankie_stubbs at 11:30 PM on April 1, 2008

"every couple minutes" - Is this hyperbole?

My recent experience is with OperaMac (still 9.25), and the worst slowdowns come with checking mail and/or newsfeeds, but you don't mention them in your post and the Mac versions definitely have different wonkiness.

You also don't mention a clean install. What I remember from having Opera on XP is that a fresh/"clean" install (search opera.com for details, I can't find it easily atm), even with importing my previous settings, always resulted in snappier browsing.

As far as notes go, it seems much better on a Mac (currently 2.3MB notes.adr). When I used it on XP, every time I accessed them it would hang (writing to or browsing them). If I left them alone it would be fine.

You would almost certainly have better luck posting on the Opera forums. From what I remember of them people would be extraordinarily helpful if you phrased your question in the right way (sort of like here).

I've been an Opera fan nearly as long as you. Right now, the only thing keeping me using it is the intuitive native keyboard shortcuts that I can't seem to replicate anywhere else without glitches or slowdowns. VIVA these newfangled trackpads for (hopefully) my next MacBook.
posted by a_green_man at 12:53 AM on April 2, 2008

Oh, I should mention that I had been running some of the early 9.x on XP with (occasionally) similar results as you, clean installs usually helped in my case. Have you investigated widgets? I never found them to work particularly well.
posted by a_green_man at 12:58 AM on April 2, 2008

I run Opera 9.26 on two WinXP PCs: #1 is a 1GHz Intel P4 with 1GB RAM and the other is a 2GHz Athlon 64 X2 with 2GB RAM. The problem you've described occurs frequently on PC#1, but never on PC#2; I've noticed the freezeups tend to occur when GMail, Google Reader, or most other javascript-heavy web apps. I'm wondering if heavy use of XMLHttpRequest is a factor. It's gotten so that I tend to rely on HTML Gmail and Mobile Google Reader when using Opera; the scaled down UIs take a lot less effort for the browser.

You'll be happy to know that so far the latest nightly builds of 9.5 don't have this problem, though I still find them too unstable for regular use.
posted by brownpau at 5:32 AM on April 2, 2008

a_green_man - I have the same results on my laptop with the upgraded Opera install as I have on my work desktop, which I recently clean installed XP and applications, including Opera. I never use widgets, and never read newsgroups (anymore). I leave my Gmail'ing for Firefox.
posted by sonicbloom at 7:54 AM on April 2, 2008

Before switching completely over to the Mac a few months ago, I was finding that the Windows versions of pretty much every piece of free software I used were both performing terribly and crashing frequently. Opera, Firefox, Openoffice, Gaim, etc... Across the board. This is no comment on the stability of XP (most commercial software continued to run just fine), or on those projects particularly (as the Mac and linux identical new versions seemed to be much more stable), just my own observation.
posted by Caviar at 10:05 AM on April 2, 2008