I got so annoyed by various apps (VScode, Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird) burning CPU/GPU cycles and and making my laptop hot and sluggish with spinners on otherwise static content, that I made this little page to fight this.
Comments
echoangle•2h ago
Your claimed GPU usage seems really high for a simple spinner, even considering the CPU is pretty old. I wonder if there's some other problem going on with your setup.
nh2•1h ago
I don't think so. This is just what happens when you redraw the screen.
Doing it 30x more frequent than needed costs more, no matter if it's only 1 pixel.
This problem is not isolated to me or to just one machine. Check out the chromium bug about the tab loading spinner, for example. It is a "simple" spinner as well.
Or the Zed editor, which spams screen redraws even when nothing changes at all, so it has high GPU usage for still picture.
jy14898•22m ago
I'm on mobile so I'm not able to check, but can the will-change and contain attributes reduce the cost?
nonamesleft•2h ago
I truly wish i could get everything to use the ticking clock one at 1Hz (or maybe 0.5) for spinners, animation in user interfaces causes me anguish in general, so i have to go around filtering them on webapps.
Diti•53m ago
Those aren’t spinners (also called numeric updowns, see [1]). Those are throbbers (also called loading icons, see [2]).
echoangle•2h ago
nh2•1h ago
Doing it 30x more frequent than needed costs more, no matter if it's only 1 pixel.
This problem is not isolated to me or to just one machine. Check out the chromium bug about the tab loading spinner, for example. It is a "simple" spinner as well.
Or the Zed editor, which spams screen redraws even when nothing changes at all, so it has high GPU usage for still picture.
jy14898•22m ago