There seems to have been some kind of update over the past month or so to YouTube which has caused performance to bog quite substantially.
Prior to a month ago, I could watch 1080p videos on my old 2007 desktop pretty smoothly. Now it is a slideshow. OK it’s an old bit of kit, except it’s running modern components, should be better when I get the NVMe controller working and hosting the operating system.
My 2015 Macbook Air and the Xbox Series S is also struggling.
It’s not the network connection, speed tests are pretty stable and reliable here, I test it regularly, and you can see Youtube caches its chunks well ahead of the play cursor anyway.
I’m getting a new computer on Monday, will try that, but it’s getting annoying. Not that long ago even Forumosa (although Discourse is to blame) slammed shut on the door that allows my iPhone to access the site, so my Macbook Air’s days are numbered, it seems. Makes owning your stuff not really “ownership”, innit?
Unnecessary new hardware and chip waste is good for Taiwan I guess.
You don’t need nvme, because while SATA drives are slower, what matters is latency and response time, and in practice SATA SSD is only slightly slower than nvme, so you don’t need nvme controllers.
There could be a few things, and my system is a bit old but changing over to a SATA SSD increased system responsiveness over all by a large margin.
I’m not noticing any performance loss on YouTube.
Check if your computer have a malware. Clean install if you have to, but get rid of your HDD. It could also be dying.
Or you have a meowware…
Another thing is clean your system, dusts and cat hair causes the system to overheat and throttle.
You might have accidentally installed something on your main computer (less likely on your MacBook Air) that is constantly running in the background and using up a lot of bandwidth, which slows down your whole network even for your other devices.
Speed test will only show you the speed that’s coming in from your router. It won’t show you if a certain computer is hogging that bandwidth.
Try shutting down all your computers and devices and phones except the MacBook Air, and then try YouTube on it.
Not always Malware, it could be a legitimate bit of software that’s causing a conflict.
Sometimes you can get a badly written codec that’s having trouble running on older hardware, or a driver that’s not supported.
Try booting in safe mode and see how things play then.
I mostly watch YouTube on the Xbox Series S, I don’t use Quick Resume and it’s in Power Saving mode (hard off) and even that struggles.
Only thing I can think of is that it might be too hot in here. Some hardware throttles when the ambient temperature gets over 35 degrees. The only thermometer I have is in the dark on the other side of the flat and it says 26 degrees.
nothing to do with ambient heat, they only throttle if the chip itself exceeds 70 degrees, they’re rated to operate at that heat.
Problem is if your heat sink and fan is clogged with dust, cat hair, etc. then it matters not how cool your room is, that heat isn’t getting out and it’s going to throttle. Clean the computer.
Turn on the AC too, because if you’re hot, so is your computer.
Could be an update to whatever browser side javascript is running to decode, or could be an update to the JITting, that is the browser. I have seen spontaneous performance regressions in Chrome releases. Take some profiles from your browser if you suspect it is a js thing, could check where code is spending all its time?
