Chess dot com memory leak?

New to this site, played my first few games today. Lag is very noticeable and distracting. After completing four games and in the middle of a fifth (lol, that could be taken wrong!), Chrome browser crashed as being out of memory. I just now logged in to the site via Firefox, and the memory usage is a massive >200Mb.

Am I doing something wrong or does this mean the end of my being able to play "Live Chess?"

As an aside, I wanted to find that fifth opponent and apologize for abandoning the game, but the site did not keep a record of the game, not even the matchup details. That's distressing, as I'm sure the opponent was a bit miffed.

In the few moments since I've started this topic, the memory usage has climbed to >230Mb and showing no signs of stopping its rise, and all I'm doing is sitting here looking at the topic screen.

Yup, Chess.com has a huge memory leak!! After a few games it consumes nearly 2G memory. It's one thing run ads for non-paying players, it's whole another matter when the website has a huge sink hole for a memory leak. Terrible experience.

Also experiencing this problem. I hope chess.com will see the light in making the site less laggy for users by re-initializing ad information every time a new game is started.

@TesseractA: I'd be more than happy to re-write the code for them, at a price of course :-) Currently using alternate means to mitigate their memory leak hahaha

@Ch3ssBored I'd love to be an employee too, but I hope they wouldn't rule me out for being critical. I'm suggesting it may be better for this website if users didn't have to use those alternate means.

Tried version three and it kept consuming resources until Safari locked up. Switched to verion two and no problems. Version 3 looks great, but needs some fixes.

@VanisleGuy - Version 2? Do you have a link to this version? thanks. Was in the middle of a game winning and memory climbed to 2GB and locked the google chrome. They worst chess site ever! Ads run non-stop during ever move. Run 3 ads per game and stop.

Same problem here. Maybe the best option is change to some site whom don't abuse on advertisment.  chees24.com here I go

It slows down and freez for many seconds. How many time outs for this issue? enough is enough, from every 2 games one is a loss due to my extreme delay... I'm sorry but, I have an impression that we are complaining against chess.com to chess.com.... Like many other online issues such ignorance simply means that it is either on purpose or a result of decapacitated management or technical team.... If someone knows a better platform with similar interface and challange que, please introduce., otherwise; I'll choose my descktop software to play...

When I load chess.com on Chrome, the memory usage is insane... and when I close it, it's still loaded..... On lichess, it doesn't happen... Chess.com is doing something funny with Chrome

I'd recommend changing the browser to something other than Chrome, such as Firefox...

Agreed! I also only use Firefox on this site.

To play fair speed chess on this site you must close the game screen after each game. That resets the page RAM usage to approx. 400 MBytes. If you fail to remember to do that the page's RAM gradually grows after each game you play on that board. About 3 games without reloading the page gets the page's use to 700 MB. After 12 games it goes to 1GigaByte. after a few dozen games it will pass 1.4 GB going up to 4 GB. Somewhere along that ramping a modest computer like my MacBook Air runs the graphics in slow motion, and the sound effects occur several seconds after the pieces move on the screen. A couple of games after those punishments reduce the games to essentially nonsense, the screen goes black with the words "Ah, Snap: something went wrong" and you have lost that last game and must reload chess.com anyway to be allowed by them to play further chess. I've gone through that a few hundred times, and most other people's posts about this subject match my exact RAM increase measurements. One poster said "but chess.com is the only site in town so we're forced to deal with whatever they do to their chess board pages". As far as I know that statement is correct. But as I said, reloading the chess board page after each game completely solves those RAM problems, and its not that time consuming a task to have to do, and I guess chess.com doesn't punish players who do that (maybe).

That's a super insightful breakdown — thanks for laying it out in such detail. It really sounds like you've done some serious observation and probably more troubleshooting than most people would think to do. It’s wild how predictable the memory creep is: 400 MB fresh, creeping steadily past 1 GB and ultimately crashing near 4 GB. That kind of memory leak (or at least non-release) sounds like something in their front-end isn’t properly garbage collecting after games end.

And yeah, it’s true — for many players, especially those who care about interface, features, and community size, chess.com really is the only game in town, despite there being other options like Lichess or Chess24. But chess.com has just nailed the whole ecosystem — blitz, puzzles, lessons, streamers, etc.

It's kind of frustrating that such a well-funded and high-traffic site hasn’t addressed what is clearly a recurring issue, especially if it’s been confirmed by many users over time. But you nailed the workaround: close and reopen the board after every game. That’s a solid trick, even if it feels a bit clunky for something that ideally should "just work."

Also interesting that even a decently specced machine like a MacBook Air (which handles most tasks beautifully) starts dragging under that load. Makes you wonder what exactly is being retained in memory with each finished game — maybe not just the graphics but cached data or even stray audio/video processes from ads or UI overlays?

Are you mostly playing blitz or bullet when this happens? Or does it affect you even in longer time controls?