Has Adultwork been infected or is it mining virtual currency?

[LLPunting]

Anyone else noticed that CPU loads ramp up when you leave a few AW tabs open?  Just killed Chrome task because 12 profiles in separate tabs were causing 35% processor load.  Only those tabs "broke" when I killed the process, tabs with UKP and other things were unaffected and the load dropped off.
This has been getting worse over the last week.

Any tech savvies who can tell if it's shite programming or deliberate exploitation?

Running Windows 10.

Can't be sure if something similar happens on Android phone but my battery doesn't last like it used to.

[vw]

what browser?

[LLPunting]

Chrome

Just did it again.  Even if I close tabs from 12 to 6 the load remained at 30+% for a good few mins.

[gash bash]

what browser?

He said chrome.

I doubt they would waste their effort to steal your cpu for mining. Most coins are mined with gpu rigs, there are a handful of coins that are cpu mineable but they are small and insignificant.
I have mined sevaral coins and its not that easy, they would have to install mining software and point it to the mining pool.

You should do a virus scan to be sure.

[jok32]

Various sites mine when you got their sites open as a way of paying for them. Some are nice enough to tell you.
I would have thought AW made enough profit not to need to do this, but greed is infinite as we all know.
And with how many users AW has they wouldn't need to run an intensive mining op on each machine accessing it

[kuck]

No. Might be your computer. 

There's no continuous javascript activity going on. And I don't see any references to mining scripts in their source.

[LLPunting]

No. Might be your computer. 

There's no continuous javascript activity going on. And I don't see any references to mining scripts in their source.

Cheers, seems very odd that it's only happening with AW pages.  Got loads of other stuff open and no such behaviour.

[scutty brown]

you may be on to something
I just opened Chrome, then went to AW
Taskmanager showed TEN instances of Chrome running. Something is loading with AW

[gash bash]

Just got home and opened up a dozen Adultwork tabs and Chrome cpu usage is around 3%. If i move focus away from chrome to another window then chrome cpu goes down to nearly 0%

I have Windows 10 aswell.

[kuck]

Cheers, seems very odd that it's only happening with AW pages.  Got loads of other stuff open and no such behaviour.

You could try profiling the page for a few seconds - External Link/Members Only

If it doesn't make sense, send me a screenshot of the results, and I'll be happy to interpret it for you.

[LLPunting]

You could try profiling the page for a few seconds - External Link/Members Only

If it doesn't make sense, send me a screenshot of the results, and I'll be happy to interpret it for you.

Thanks to all so far.   

I am running ad killers, will try disabling to eliminate any incompatibilities.

Will try again later and try to get some stats.   

[Grenadier36]

Looks OK to me OP. Chrome is a memory hog anyway, especially if you have a lot of extensions running.
Just loaded a few WG profiles and ~80 http requests made, if something weird was going on you can keep an eye on the network tab (hit f12 in Chrome)

[CheeseBoard]

I've never heard of virtual currency mining, (not a computer expert in any way)

Can anyone give a layman's description of what it is.  I had a read on wiki, and know less than when I started.  It started talking about Bitcoin, which I kind of don't get either 

If someone is mining on my pc, what does it do to my pc?

Sorry for the ignorance

[OmegaRed]

I think its your device... Nothing seems different in my PC when I run AW

I've just opened plenty of tabs in AW and don't notice anything different in task manager... I run a fairly well specced gaming PC

[scutty brown]

I've never heard of virtual currency mining, (not a computer expert in any way)

Can anyone give a layman's description of what it is.  I had a read on wiki, and know less than when I started.  It started talking about Bitcoin, which I kind of don't get either 

If someone is mining on my pc, what does it do to my pc?

Sorry for the ignorance

this will give a basic background
External Link/Members Only

[Grenadier36]

you may be on to something
I just opened Chrome, then went to AW
Taskmanager showed TEN instances of Chrome running. Something is loading with AW

Chrome extensions also load instances in task manager. I checked AW earlier and there seems nothing untoward. ~80 http requests on a profile page, no redirects or ajax calls or anything like that

[LLPunting]

Thanks again to all for responses.   

I have a handful of extensions (all reputable ones) but like I said the issue is only with AW tabs, without them the PC pootles on silently and unfussed.  The spike in CPU isn't straight away, it takes a few mins to happen but then rattles on for many mins, being as it's a laptop the fan then kicks in to cool so the battery is taking more of a hit.

[OldVic]

Just started using to use this site....no issues for me and I use Chrome.

[Grenadier36]

Thanks again to all for responses.   

I have a handful of extensions (all reputable ones) but like I said the issue is only with AW tabs, without them the PC pootles on silently and unfussed.  The spike in CPU isn't straight away, it takes a few mins to happen but then rattles on for many mins, being as it's a laptop the fan then kicks in to cool so the battery is taking more of a hit.

I've left an AW tab on Chrome Incognito open since 8ish (10:15 now) and it registers <300Mb on Task Manager. How much RAM do you have installed? As mentioned earlier Chrome is a massive resource hog, I have an incognito session as well as a standard session open so 46 tabs - just over 4.6Gb of memory used

[CheeseBoard]

this will give a basic background
External Link/Members Only

Cheers SB, will have a read 

[wristjob]

shift-escape in chrome gives you the chrome task manager which might give more info

[Grenadier36]

shift-escape in chrome gives you the chrome task manager which might give more info

Indeed and at 57K the AW session I mentioned above has one of the smaller footprints. Some bookies sites are absolute memory holes even on powerful/well specced machines.

[wristjob]

I use ublock origin for ad blocking because it's supposed to take a smaller memory footprint than ABP.

I use a similar setup for basic browsing & general office work to what I did years ago except I've constantly upgraded the memory. It just seems that all websites now have so much more bloat than even 3-4 years ago and how even small web pages take tens of megabytes is beyond me. Then again as I type this I see a row of about 30 animated GIF emojis. In my experience it's the memory more than the CPU that is the bigger problem and literally no amount of memory is enough.

[Grenadier36]

I use ublock origin for ad blocking because it's supposed to take a smaller memory footprint than ABP.

I use a similar setup for basic browsing & general office work to what I did years ago except I've constantly upgraded the memory. It just seems that all websites now have so much more bloat than even 3-4 years ago and how even small web pages take tens of megabytes is beyond me. Then again as I type this I see a row of about 30 animated GIF emojis. In my experience it's the memory more than the CPU that is the bigger problem and literally no amount of memory is enough.

Most major sites use CDNs and make the client do most of the binary caching to save their bandwidth/money. I had to upgrade my main machine as it couldn't cope with more than a handful of tabs open. Firefox used to be the worst culprit for memory leaks but most of the user agents seem to be the same now for resource-hogging