I've asked this before, but it now appears impossible for me to analyze with Stockfish in any browser (Chrome, Edge) without it freezing. Was there some recent change to the settings responsible for this, and is there any way to address it?
Click the menu button with the three stripes under the move list and check your CPUs slider. You probably want to lower the value there.
still froze just now, even set at 1
Hmm, okay. We'll look into it!
If you take a look at the "Stockfish 10+" text (on the left of the engine toggle, above the move list), what technology ("PNACL", "WASMX", "WASM" or "ASMJS") does it mention? I'm asking because only "WASMX" has had recent changes, and we haven't touched the other ones for months.
Thanks for looking into it. It seems to vary actually. Sometimes its WASM. Sometimes PNACL. Its PNACL right now on Chrome - was WASM earlier this morning, although PNACL froze on Microsoft Edge. Is there any preferred option for CPU efficiency and any way to control that if so?
There's no way to control it, as Lichess will always pick the most efficient one supported by your browser, and only step down when it crashes for some reason. For the current stable version of Chrome, that's PNACL. For Edge, it's WASM as Edge doesn't have PNACL. (Are you sure you saw PNACL on Edge?) I can't reproduce any freezing myself. Does it always freeze or is it just for a certain set of positions that it freezes?
It freezes consistently when I analyze. And it started only in the last month. I'm wondering if the search depth may have been changed.
I'm afraid I'm out of ideas, then...
Though one thing you could try: PNACL is deprecated technology and will be removed from Chrome at some point, and then WASMX will be picked for Chrome. It's probably already removed from Chrome Beta, so if you switch from Chrome to Chrome Beta and it uses WASMX, then you can see if that does not freeze.
I quite don't understand what is the CPU slider. The only slider I see is the multipv mode slider, deciding what number of best lines SF should show. The more the slider, the slower it gets depth, but on the other hand you can see more good lines starting with different moves. I always considered this to be such a trade off, is it really somehow connected with CPU usage? I think if there is a way to reduce CPU usage, it should be by some other means restricting the browser CPU usage as a process in your OS.
I think I also catched a freeze some time [not greater than a month] ago (I don't remember if it was in Firefox or Chromium), but that was one time, and I analyze quite often. My Chromium (stable release on Ubuntu) uses WASM at the moment, maybe you have an old version of Chrome and it should be updated?
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