Opera suddenly slowing down

[dkolars]

Running 14.04 64bit... everything was working fine until last week, when suddenly Opera browser started slowing down, big time... So, checked memory, and Swap was not being used. Futzed with that, and was better for a bit, but this week, now I get "Out of memory" errors from all open tabs. So, edited fstab, # in front of Swap (sda3) line, and restarted. Of course, no swap file there, and behavior was just as bad. Manually started swap file, and suddenly all is running smoothly again, swap file being used.

Tonight, slow-down happened again, so checked to find this:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 16334144 15004596 1329548 8841568 101740 9446364
-/+ buffers/cache: 5456492 10877652
Swap: 16675836 2773636 13902200

Looks like everything is running as it should, but why would a program freeze or slow down for NAR (no apparent reason) after running flawlessly for months?

???

[QIII]

Hello!

Could you start top in the terminal

top

and do what you have been doing.

When you reach a point where the behavior you are discussing occurs, copy the output of top and post it back here between code tags.

[dkolars]

Since I posted, everything has been working just fine, of course... but, gone for a few hours tonight and when I came home see that Opera has stopped with:
PAGE CRASHED: Unfortunately, something caused this page to quit. It might have been an extensions conflict or some other reason. Try reloading the page, or navigate to another page to continue.
But, only one tab crashed, 2 others were fine.

So, looked at top and here's what it has.

top - 23:12:53 up 2 days, 4:44, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.05
Tasks: 271 total, 1 running, 270 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 1.0 us, 1.0 sy, 0.0 ni, 98.0 id, 0.1 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 16334144 total, 13372876 used, 2961268 free, 77988 buffers
KiB Swap: 16675836 total, 3495732 used, 13180104 free. 8514804 cached Mem


PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1466 root 20 0 317344 115100 36224 S 7.6 0.7 89:38.08 Xorg
6125 dk 20 0 771992 15368 11064 S 1.7 0.1 0:25.24 xfce4-terminal
12 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 2:08.75 rcuos/4
179 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 0:11.46 usb-storage
1279 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 0:36.16 kworker/4:1
2208 dk 20 0 377236 18668 2712 S 0.3 0.1 2:58.55 ibus-daemon
2344 dk 20 0 741264 17884 11276 S 0.3 0.1 9:25.78 xfce4-panel
2875 dk 20 0 1768148 420156 47384 S 0.3 2.6 158:22.17 opera
6145 dk 20 0 32268 1768 1168 R 0.3 0.0 2:02.64 top
6411 dk 20 0 560756 89364 19192 S 0.3 0.5 8:58.86 opera
9913 dk 20 0 1302940 302184 71068 S 0.3 1.9 19:57.82 opera
28722 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 0:41.97 kworker/1:2
1 root 20 0 33876 2932 1232 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.67 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04 kthreadd
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:03.60 ksoftirqd/0
5 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kworker/0:0H
7 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 4:08.56 rcu_sched
8 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 2:02.33 rcuos/0
9 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 1:08.23 rcuos/1
10 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 1:55.51 rcuos/2
11 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 1:08.46 rcuos/3
13 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 1:08.32 rcuos/5
14 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcu_bh
15 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcuob/0
16 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcuob/1
17 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcuob/2
18 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcuob/3
19 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcuob/4
20 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcuob/5
21 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.90 migration/0
22 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.84 watchdog/0
23 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.74 watchdog/1
24 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.22 migration/1
25 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:05.36 ksoftirqd/1
27 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kworker/1:0H
28 root rt 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.75 watchdog/2

[dkolars]

Still doing it... when it happens, the CPU usage by Opera goes to over 100%??!! So, attached a couple of screen shots of the "top" output...

The 103% happened when scrolling down the Facebook page. The 115% happened when clicking on a video on Facebook page. While the video is playing, CPU usage is in the 45-80% range, then drops back to 8-20% when playback is done.

Using the History Eraser add-on for Opera or BleachBit sometimes improves performance, but no guarantee that they will... sometimes they barely run.

Closing Opera and re-starting usually works, for a while, but then it starts all over again. Seems to be mostly browser-related? Thunderbird works as usual, other programs seem to also work well... of course, when Opera is tying up all the CPU, sometimes nothing works... other times, I can use other programs. Sigh.