Upwork is killing my PC

[Wassim T]

Every time I use Upwork to hire someone, my computer starts to freeze and I end up restarting it. Up until today, I always thought that was a coincidence, but then as I was hiring today my computer slowed down a lot and I suspected something is just wrong, and when I tried to analyze it I figured out that Upwork is sucking a lot of memory, CPU and even GPU resources. 

Please do not ask me to try with a different browser. Chrome is my browser of choice and I never had any problem with it in the past 5 years, except with Upwork. 

I checked the inspector and figured out that just one page on Upwork had 375 requests to scripts and resources, each accompanied with their own latency and processing time. This is a LOT of resources considering I previewed just 4 profiles on that page through my job post. Here's a sample screenshot for your reference:

It seems to me that the problem is occurring because of the recent functionalities that Upwork introduced in past months about previewing someone's profile inside of the job post itself and hiring from there, instead of launching a separate tab with the profile's details. This move is affecting the user experience a lot. Well, I do like the added features, but what use is it when it's sucking up my computer resources?

Can you please do something? I'm afraid this is going to be a LONG time to fix, but I hope Upwork is aware of the terrible situation, and you guys are probably losing a lot of sales, only because not so many clients are patient enough to wait, understand what's going on, have the knowledge to analyze or even come here to post about their problem.

Thanks a lot.

Best regards,
Wassim

[Laila B]

I'm having the same problem but it's not when I'm hiring but often when I try to login to check messages or download work my freelancers sent. I'm not tech savvy but I think our problem might originate the same place? I'm sitting right here now not being able to access a job and pay my freelancer for a milestone. I like upwork so I hope they get things straight soon.

[Goran V]

Hi Laila,

At the moment we have an incident and that is the reason why you can`t open your message room.

[Goran V]

Hi Wassim,

Thank you for the detail feedback, I will share this with the appropriate team to be investigated further. Once we have more information we will update this thread.

[Rene K]

Upwork loves client-side requests. I don't know why the don't just render the pages server-side. Is this way more efficient for their servers? It doesn't seem to be since they still have to process all these requests. Weird.

[Wassim T]

Hi Rene.

I can answer that question. I would say it is more efficient since when calling the server via APIs, it will consume mostly text-based responses in JSON format, and those are light-weight compared to a full call with resources.

Note that loading the same resource on the same page often comes from cache. There are a lot of resources that are common across various pages, such as the logo, some icons, stylesheets, etc... Those will often come from the computer's cache when they're loaded client-side. When you navigate to a different page (full page rendering), *most* of the times the resources will be re-downloaded. It depends on how they set it up, but sometimes you cannot use CDN (Cache Delivery Network) all the time because when they actually update the website it might not roll out for everyone at the same time which is a problem. So it's a mix of CDN and other techniques to ensure faster experience while making sure to process the most recently updated resources at the same time.

In my opinion, Upwork is doing it this way because client-side can be much more efficient at times. Ajax-based applications are supposed to provider smoother experience because you don't have to update the entire page every time you make an action on a page. For example, if you want to "+1" a reply or thread in the community, it will make more sense that this is processed via Ajax on the client-side so it doesn't have to make a full refresh for the entire page, otherwise, not so many people will enjoy the experience. The only problem is that Upwork is over-doing it to a point where the browser is not able to handle it anymore, especially on the main website while hiring and most importantly on Messages like Laila mentioned. Messages should affect clients and freelancers alike.

[Rene K]

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@Wassim T wrote:

Hi Rene.

I can answer that question. 

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Which I was totally expecting actually without having asked explicitly :-)

Thanks for the deep explanation. My knowledge about Ajax is vaguely theoretical.

[Stephanie G]

Freelancer ...

Even just keeping the time tracking app going  - browser is shut down - keeps taking up memory.  My main system is loaded with RAM, but when I briefly used my laptop it was noticeably sluggish. 

What is it doing in there?

soffice.bin is the LibreOffice presentation editor with a 200-slide graphics-heavy presentation loaded, and Upwork's time tracker needs 50% as much memory just to track time in an app? 

[John K]

Ever since I switched to MacBook Pro with 16GB ram, *almost* everything runs smoothly. 

[Wassim T]

John: some people cannot afford buying a Mac 😀 Glad you're enjoying the experience brother.