Local browser sees heavy memory increase after editing pages with Confluence Cloud

[Maxwell Spangler]

I'm experiencing significant system slowness and an uncomfortable experience using Confluence Cloud after repeatedly using a browser to edit pages in Confluence Cloud.

Wondering if this is a known memory leak issue, ways to work around it, etc?

Repeatable observation:

1. Boot computer.

2. Open a variety of baseline programs like email program, password manager, and several browser windows

2a. Computer uses about 3.5G of memory as a baseline at this point.

3. Start editing in Confluence Cloud.

3a. Repeatedly add content, publish the content, then re-open the same or a different page to add/edit more content.

4. Watching a system monitor shows the browser process consuming memory as I edit pages.

5. After repeated editing, I've seen browser instances consume several gigabytes of memory and total system memory rises to > 10G with browser editing of Confluence Cloud my only significant activity.

At this point attempting to do simple editing in Confluence Cloud is slow and uncomfortable.  There's a feeling that the browser is running heavy, trying to manage a lot of memory based something and that its a different, much slower, much less enjoyable experience than on the first page edit of this process.

6. If I close the browser instance where Confluence Cloud editing is taking place, memory is returned. If I close all instances of the browser, I think I recall more memory being returned.

At this point, I can return to the same pages and edit them and the editing experience is good again.

So this certainly looks like simple editing of wiki pages with Confluence Cloud is causing a memory leak or something like it.

* * *

My task is constructing study notes on computing subjects that require mostly text but screenshots of approximately 128K to be included as well. A single Confluence page might have 1 to 32 images of this size with a relatively small amount of text (these are not dense whitepapers, etc).  This doesn't seem significant for a text editor / word processor, etc, and upon first boot and editing a large page, the experience doesn't seem too challenging for Confluence Cloud.  It's after memory rises that this is unbearable and I have to restart browsers or restart the computer.

Platform:

Fedora Linux 31 on an X86 PC

Firefox 82.0.2

I think I've seen similar experiences using Google Chrome on the same platform.

System has 16G of RAM total

This hardware is a 2015 era dual core Intel CPU so when memory rises and presumably something is working through many memory objects, the aging CPU contributes to the poor experience.  While a contemporary CPU might handle this issue faster, it's still having to work harder than it should, providing a poorer experience for the user and wasting CPU cycles (and thus power consumption).

Thanks

[Diego]

Hello @Maxwell Spangler ! Editing content is the main focus of Confluence and we are always looking at ways of improving it.

With this in mind, our product managers have raised a report so we can look after performance improvements needed for the platform.

You can check it here:

• [Confluence Cloud] [New] Slow performance while editing New Editor page

I do encourage you to go over there and share your current experience with our teams. The step by step manner and detailed message you sent is really top notch! It surely helps us to better understand how our platform performs on a different array of hardware.

Let us hear from you!