Site Speed / CPU Usage – IE

[evolve]

Hi there,

I am having a bit of an issue with the theme regarding its cpu usage. This mostly with IE 8. My clients whole system runs through this so is presently having a giraffe! Their IT manager has got back to me with a detailed report:

I’ve test this issue on a simple XP PC using IE 8. When viewing the homepage the CPU usage immediately go to 50% and stays there see attached screenshot. Obviously the site should not be require this amount of local resources from the PC. Please note using Chrome there is no issue viewing the site on this PC.

When we go to view it on our Citrix servers via IE 7 the iexplore process again hogs the system resources and takes 50% of the cpu causing the servers performance to dramatically decrease.

Is there a backward compatibility issue with the html/scripts used for the site?

On a Windows 7 the CPU is 1-3 percent with a high Memory usage which does not grind the PC to a halt.

The memory usage also seems to slowly but steadily increase it’s gone from 79,000K to over 300,000K on the process I’m monitoring at the moment and the homepage is only thing running on the entire server.

I haven’t been able to navigate past the homepage to see what how the other pages react in IE8 due to the fact iexplore is unresponsive. It requires a process to be manually killed via the task manager. Is the scripting issue just associated with the homepage or all pages?

Now, I am no expert at all this and in truth my client is a bit prickly, but I am wondering have you had any issues with it before? The theme has not being customised in any way and very little extra plugins have been added (see attached grab). I have tested it on my systems (using IE Tester & Sauce labs) and it is lagging in IE 8, though I don’t fully trust the results in either of these applications.

I have looked at W3 Total Cache to see if this can remedy the problem, but it just kills the site in IE.

My site test is at: http://omr.evolvedesign.ie

I would be grateful if you could have a look or if you have come across this issue before to let me know of any solutions.

Thanks
Mick

[Ben – SUPPORT]

The issue being, this is a rather modern site. Where as XP and ie8 are both old.

The IE8 Javascript engine is considerably slower than the chrome engine this causes obvious lag that cannot be prevented. In the case of it taking up a lot of CPU that’s bound the happen, I imagine it’s an old pc with a not very modern CPU.

There is not a lot you can do in the way of using less resources, you’ll probably find most modern websites will “hog” a lot of CPU due to it using modern code and modern animation.

You might find minifying code and making images less quality will reduce the amount needed, but you’ll find, by not a lot

Hope this helps
Thanks
Ben

[evolve]

Thanks for the quick reply Ben. I had though as much too. We have even given stats to the client showing less than 6% of user viewing in IE8 in our country, but its a sticking point.
Thanks again for your response, I’ll let them know.
Thanks
Mick