8/29/14 7:07 PM

I participate in the roadbikereview.com forums daily, and over the past month or so have experienced a strange phenomenon. I'm typically working on my computer from early morning, visiting all kinds of governmental, recreational, and commercial web sites throughout the day. Then in the evenings I come here and to roadbikereview.

And sometimes roadbikereview turns into a total resource hog. It ties up the CPU on my machine making it nearly impossible to even save a WORD document. I have checked this repeatedly with the Resource Monitor that is built into Win7 and you can clearly see that when I close out of the roadbikereview web site, CPU usage drops dramatically. The applications that show the high resource use are simply IE11 (I typically have multiple tabs open, so the resource monitor shows each tab separately). I often see a single IE11 tab consuming 20-25% of my CPU, and with multiple tabs it essentially locks up my computer. When I close out of roadbikereview the problem evaporates but if I reopen a tab for roadbikereview, it comes right back. Even closing the browser and restarting doesn't fix it. Only shutting down my computer will clear the problem.

Any ideas as to what is going on and more importantly how to prevent it?

8/29/14 7:19 PM

Get Ghostery

8/29/14 7:20 PM

Ad Block Plus

Block all the embedded flash bloatware.

8/29/14 8:15 PM

Safari lets you block Flash as a power save feature which of course would indicate that it is consuming tons of CPU time. Try the Windows version and see if that helps when you require approval from a site to run flash.

8/31/14 6:52 PM

So I did the following in IE 11:

Tools, Internet Options, Security, Restricted Sites, Custom Level, Sites, enter the site you want to block add-ins and Flash.

We'll see how this works. Thanks for the suggestions.

9/1/14 12:44 AM

I run Firefox with the following add-ons: Adblock Edge, BetterPrivacy, Disconnect, DoNotTrackMe, Flashblock, HTTPS-Everywhere, Lightbeam, NoScript. Seems to cut out virtually all of the shit that would otherwise assail me on various web sites.

9/1/14 7:11 PM

Nick lists an impressive array of defensive weapons, but so far the change in IE 11 settings seems to have worked a trick. The site is not as functional now:

- I have to log in with every visit (even after I log in on one tab, if I open a new tab and go to the site via Favorites, it requires another login).

- You no longer can see a list of the thread (with comments tagged as new and old) but have to scroll down and look at the times on the comments

- You no longer can jump from one sub-forum to another via a pull down list

But there is no more issue with the site eating my computer alive. It just goes to show how intertwined Flash is in their site architecture as well as how much stuff they have going that reaches out and grabs your computer resources. Frustrating.

9/1/14 8:22 PM

ABP lets you more selectively target content on a website for blocking.

for instance, on this forum i block only the banner image.

on other websites i often will block a particular section or frame on a certain page that is used for flash content or graphics.



i sometimes visit rbikereview...here's what it looks like for me with ABP...zero ads or bloatware visible...

9/2/14 7:20 AM

I took a look under the hood, by pressing the F12 key in Internet Explorer, and here is what I discovered for visiting the forum home page, forums.roadbikereview.com...

1,527 files were downloaded and totaled 11.76mb. Yikes! No individual file took a long time to load, but collectively, that is an insane amount of files to comprise/support/make-up a single web page and a huge payload to download for a single web page request.

In a nutshell, the forum is poorly designed and you are absolutely correct, it is a website that greatly hogs resources.

9/2/14 6:53 PM

Thanks for doing that JS. I was not aware of that trick.

I think there are things on that site that turn on and off, or maybe are different on different days of the week, because this problem was not universal. Nearly every day but not every day. And it seemed that the longer I stayed on the site the worse it got. There were several times when the only way out was to shut down my computer - shutting down IE and restarting it was not sufficient.

I would get those annoying audio ads where you couldn't find a "stop" button or maybe even the add, and videos that would play without any stop button, etc. This stuff seemed to plié up the longer I stayed on the site.

And with the IE11 block suggested by Erik, all the adds on the right side of the page are now just blank space.

Others are complaining about the site as well. It is frustrating that the tools that allow a more convenient web experience are the same ones that enable such massive intrusion.

9/3/14 11:17 PM

I kept hearing folks recommend the AdBlock Plus, so finally I did the quick run to get it installed and activated.

Couldn't have been easier or much quicker, and the slow download problems seem to be history.

So thanks to Walter and others who recommended this.