MacBook overheating during game

Why is it, that my MacBook goes full throttle on the fans when i start a game. It's not when i analyze the game, it's literally while playing a normal game.

i mean, if you mine crypto on my rig, at least give me my share or chess premium

Hi Phulib,

I hope you are keeping well.

I'm not sure exactly what may be causing your issue, however I know my MacBook doesn't have any issue while playing and most of my system resources are still free while playing.

Is it possible perhaps you have many applications or browser tabs open at the same time while playing?

I would also make sure that your system updates are fully up to date. 

Regards

KB

yeah, it's only 1 tab and it's on both safari and firefox. also i have the latest macOS installed, so thats really weird

Same here, my Mac mini starts roaring while I am playing on chess.com site. It looks like they use our CPU's for some kind of calculations on their side. I think I'll try another chess site because it is quite annoying.

Similar issues here.  I have an 3.1ghz i7 Macbook... Chess.com (game or analysis board) causes my fans to scream at 100% and I can watch my battery drop from a full charge to 20% in about 10 minutes of being on Chess.com.  I am also using Firefox with one tab open.  But have seen similar in Safari-- (I refuse to use Chrome)

Here is how to fix an overheating Mac since chess.com doesn't seem to want to fix it.

Open a Terminal window:

1. Grab cpulimit from "brew".  (If you are not using brew utility on your Mac, you should , google it if you need to learn how to install & use brew.)
   
   brew install cpulimit
   
   
2. Find your Firefox process 'pid' (or substitute your browser)
   
   ps -ax | grep -v grep | grep -E 'COMMAND|firefox'
   
   
3. Throttle your browser while using chess.com.  I found 40% to be good on my 3.1ghz i7, YMMV
   
   cpulimit -l 40 -p 1234  [where 40 is % and where 1234 is the pid returned from above]
   

When done playing, go back to your terminal window and CTRL-C cpulimit, or close and reopen Firefox.

Hope this helps, and I hope chess.com developers see this and maybe optimize their code.  I can see "Analysis" taking more cpu overhead, but simply playing games should send the coordinates and update the screen without much overhead...

FYI, this also works for linux (apt install cpulimit)

It really doesn't matter what browser on Mac you use.  I even tried a fresh Chromium compile, Brave, Vivaldi.  I am a Firefox guy at the end of the day.

@Rabbit memory is not the issue with high CPU/Heat from chess.com.  I would beware those "Memory Cleaner Apps".  You can do the same thing in the Terminal with the [sudo purge] command.  No need for sketchy 3rd party apps.

In the meantime, I will continue to limit MY CPU to chess.com to control battery drain, heat & noise. 

Someone just explained it to me. this is what he said and yes I agree the best solution would be to limit cpu usage to chess.com because if not it will allow the cpu to overclock

“

Stockfish and other engines require enough processing power to be effective. It seems that the website + chrome is set up in such a way that there is no limit in resources given to the engine, which causes the CPU and RAM to obviously work more. On edge there might be a limit to the resources it can contribute, and such it does not run under such load.

TLDR: Engine needs resources, more resources = more engine computing power but at the same time more load on the computer

“

Maybe its time for an upgrade. Check if there are any programs and applications that are overheating your Mac. Check for viruses and unnecessary programs. 

Tell me how an upgrade from: 3.1 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 w/16gb RAM, with nothing else running, is not enough to play online chess? 

No problems playing LiChess or other sites...

Chess.com does not manage client side resources, it will use 100% of what you have 100% of the time leading to the issues mentioned above (Heat, Battery Drain).

Perhaps I am the only guy who likes playing on a laptop at my local coffee shop...ideally without plugging into a power outlet and fans at 100% to cool it...

I'm seeing this too.  I use "Activity Monitor" and can see the CPU jump way above 100%.  I have to kill the process every few seconds during a "normal game" which is extremely annoying.  There's no way online chess should consume that much CPU on a MacBook Pro 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 with Ventura.

Do chess.com not care about resolving this?  A quick google search shows this has been going on for years.

same here macbook m2 pro 2023 overheats when having one tab open in safari.

This actually appears to have been resolved in recent months. Anyone else notice a drop in CPU and Temps? Seems fine in Firefox for me.

i have an asus vivobook and no problem for me

It happened to me as well after I went to the analysis tab and selected Chess Engine: Stockfish 16 (45Mb) from the settings tab. When I reverted to Stockfish 15 Lite, my MacBook didn't overheat anymore.