Pages freezing and can't be refreshed

[saraclara]

Chrome on a laptop.
If I walk away to do something else for a while and then come back to a mumsnet page, I find it frozen. Refreshing doesn't do anything and the page remains unresponsive. I have to close it and start from scratch.

This had been happening for a few days, and only with mumsnet. What's going on?

Thanks so much both!

Are you able to grab a screen record of this happening at all? It might help us replicate it.

Hmm - it was a bit better yesterday .... but now worse today

Still on laptop on chrome

It's been awful for days. Particularly if I navigate away from the tab and back, it will freeze, load very slowly and sometimes refuse to refresh. Clicking on an image in a thread will take ages to appear then ages to go when I click the x. Sometimes it will completely freeze so I have to close the tab.

Using chrome on an android phone.

It is making the site unusable and I'm not bothering to read much at all atm. I've been here 12 years and this is stopping me returning.

We're really sorry about this.

We are having difficulty replicating the issue - which makes it hard for us to release a fix.

Are you able to grab a screen record of this happening at all? It might help us replicate it.

How would that help? (genuine question)

All you would see is a page, the time and that there's a whirly circle.

There's no error message or corruption of the page. Just frozen.

And sometimes browser crashes, but again there's nothing to show - just that the browser is closed. And a bit later maybe a 'closed unexpectedly' dialogue box (which does not give reason)

It can just be really helpful to have a visual when replicating issues. It's sort of a guessing game otherwise. And sometimes we can spot the problem just by seeing it happen.

Can we check your browser is up to date, and have you attempted to clear your cache? This really can help. If you'd like instructions let us know and we'll get them sent over.

We know we ask for a lot of info and can be quite annoying, but we're just really keen to get this sorted out. Thanks for taking the time to explain for us.

I get freezing pages a fair bit. Sometimes when I just leave things for an hour, sometimes much longer. Don't know if it's related but I also get "error code 5" fairly frequently (only on MN). Screenshot attached. This page had been left overnight, though it definitely doesn't have to be that long. I'm on Chrome Version 102.0.5005.115 (Official Build) (x86_64) on an old MacBook Air running Monterey v12.1.

Just to add - this didn't happen to all the threads I had open overnight but to at least two, maybe three (I only just thought of this thread on the last one, sorry).

Thank you!

That's really helpful.

Can we check your browser is up to date, and have you attempted to clear your cache?

I have posted about this too, have thread somewhere...

My browser is up to date. Not sure if I've cleared my cache since this started happening. I did early on in the MN update because of issues. But that may have been before this started. I'll do it now and let you know if it happens again.

Thank you!

Sorry I missed the request for info. I'm using MN in a browser on an android tablet. I cleared my cache as suggested, things improved for a couple of minutes and then pages started freezing, taking ages to load or wouldn't refresh again. It's much quicker for me to go back to a Google search to open MN again.

Happened again. Tab had been open several hours. Three tabs gave this error. A fourth, that has been open less time (but still hours), did not. Cleared cache this morning when I last posted here.

Left it last night to go to sleep.
Just now:
This page is having a problem
Try coming back to it later etc....

Windows 10 laptop using Edge as I thought it was Chrome causing it so changed over.

This time I refreshed and it actually loaded. I fell off my chair in shock.

I used to right click on threads that looked interesting to me but I can't do this anymore. I have to look at them one at a time. If I open tabs this way they just don't load.

My joy was short lived.
Went out mid thread. Returned and page was frozen, refresh is still not finished after far too long, I'm done with it.
What is the point of a site that is re-launched and still doesn't work?

Thanks everyone for getting back to us. Just to let you know this is on our radar and we are taking a look.

Thanks for your patience.

Finding it all goes absolutely massive when reading on a laptop. Can only see huge logo etc and no actual thread content.

This is what it looks like when I try and open a tab while I have others (usually 4-10 or so) open to read later. I have been doing this for years and it has never caused an issue before.

As you can see, it loads a tiny bit then stops. It will stay this way for minutes. I then will navigate away and when I come back, the page is just blank with no loading bar.

If I do manage to get a long thread open, it will sometimes randomly go to the 'Oh Snap' reload screen then when I do reload, if it loads, I've lost my place.

Don't know how much this will help but it seems to be a memory leak problem.

If I leave 4-5 threads open and go away then when I return and try to bring the tabs to the front they suddenly start using 4-8 Gigabytes each.

I had left task manager open so I could look quickly as I'd seen this before.

I was testing this on a desktop computer with a lot of ram so it coped better than the average laptop but it ground to a halt and 3 pages failed to display.

One gave an out of memory message and the other two the 'snap' error. (see below)

I watched the ram usage drop back to normal in task manager after perhaps 30 seconds and then I was able to refresh and get the pages back.

It should not have given an out of memory error at all as in addition to the ram there was 32gb virtual memory available.

I would call it a Chrome problem as I can't reproduce it in firefox, but the way pages on this site update may be contributing as it doesn't happen anywhere else.

I am finding that long threads seem to freeze. I usually browse MN on an Android laptop using Chrome. I use the setting to see all posts, no pages. If I leave a tab open with an MN thread on it, when I come back hours later it won't refresh or scroll. I get a little message at the top that asks me if I want to wait or exit. Saying wait makes little difference. The quickest thing to do is to close down the tab and start again, which is irritating.

Morning, everyone. We've checked in with Tech about this issue this morning. They agree @LastTrainEast that it's likely a memory leak and they're trying to track it down right now. We'll be back as soon as there's any news to update you.

If I leave a tab open with an MN thread on it, when I come back hours later it won't refresh or scroll. I get a little message at the top that asks me if I want to wait or exit. Saying wait makes little difference. The quickest thing to do is to close down the tab and start again, which is irritating.

That's exactly what I get on my windows laptop, using chrome.

I've been getting the 'Aw Snap' thing popping up when I am in the middle of scrolling down while reading a thread, and also when I post a comment, so it happens during active use.

At other times the screen won't budge at all, and sticks in one place. Usually about halfway down a long thread. You can't scroll up or down, or refresh it. No error message or anything, it just freezes completely.

Desktop / Chrome.