Why does recreation.gov use so much CPU? Bad design, or something more sinister?

2

I came back to my desktop in the morning after researching campgrounds the night before and noticed my desktop was cooking! Full fan speeds, etc.

Assuming I had visited a website that had a GPU Miner installed, I started looking sorting through my open tabs (all 30+ of them, I have a problem!) only to find that the culprit was a US government site https://recreation.gov. Specifically, this page: https://www.recreation.gov/camping/campsites/11555

Whenever I open this page, my CPU (not GPU) spikes, and according to Google task manager (Shift+Esc), the GPU Process spikes and Memory goes up.

Google Task Manager Process list

Looking through the source code and network tab, I don't see anything that screams cryptomining or otherwise, so I'm wondering... is this just bad design somewhere? Maybe with the map libs, or animation libs?

I use Antiminer, No Coin and AdBlock Plus.

What do y'all think?

Zach

Posted 2019-03-22T14:55:18.377

Reputation: 131

Question was closed 2019-04-09T11:27:39.053

You can use Developer Tools’ Performance profiler to find out stuff like that. – Daniel B – 2019-03-22T15:15:16.277

I have. Most of the CPU usage reported in the profiler is related to animation and draw functions, but it doesn't seem to correlate with the true amount of CPU being used. – Zach – 2019-03-22T16:03:04.883

Seems to be a Chrome issue - try another browser. Firefox uses little CPU for the site, or other pages there. – DrMoishe Pippik – 2019-04-08T02:03:31.027

Answers

2

The DevTools Performance profiler tells you very exactly what this is about:

enter image description here

From the second stack frame we can see this is about a map. The map is at the very bottom of the page and is powered by WebGL. It is apparently not designed to skip updates if nothing happened but is instead running at the maximum fps possible.

There isn’t any other activity. If you block the map, the CPU usage disappears. It’s the map.

Daniel B

Posted 2019-03-22T14:55:18.377

Reputation: 40 502

1So it is... bad design? – zx485 – 2019-03-22T22:17:49.380

@zx485 I wouldn’t call it bad, but it could be improved, yes. – Daniel B – 2019-03-23T12:43:27.540

Asked: 2019-03-22T14:55:18.377

Viewed: 81 times

Active: 2019-03-22T21:48:52.983