Discord is Eating a lot of CPU for some reason

EvilLord

I dont know whats wrong with the Desktop app but its eating the CPU a lot like almost half of my CPU power is being used by the desktop app !!!!

please help !!!

26

Comments

65 comments

Date Votes
  • QuoteMan

    I am also currently experiencing high cpu usage.

    8
  • tonton_rally

    Same here ! Idle, without doing anything on discord.

    6
  • linkztream

    For macbook pro I solved the problem by disabling hardware acceleration so it stopped using the discreet gfx. 

    4
  • dinahole

    Same here with the latest update even after closing window of discord it does not shut of program 17-18% usage with a intel 9700k

    3
  • marcusquinn

    I prefer this workaround now, just create your own Discord WebApp with this Electron WebApp browser builder:

    https://webcatalogapp.com

    Everything works the same, except no red Discord Helper (Renderer).

    Plus, tons of other similar apps to save from duplicate multi-tab madness :)

    3
  • Armalyte

    This is still a major issue! Why isn't this fixed yet with any of the 100s of updates discord had meanwhile?

    Stop selling discord as a GAME voice chat when it's eating most of our cpu's.

    And any app that needs virus scanners and firewall turned off to install is a very shady app.

    3
  • catalystjs

    I solved the issue by doing the following:

    Open in-discord settings > Voice & Video > Scroll down until you see 'openH264' > Disable "OpenH264 Video Codec Provided by Cisco System, inc. > scroll down until 'echo cancellation' > disable "Echo Cancellation, Noise Reduction and automatic Gain Control"

    and voila, your discord should go from 30 to 60% CPU while idle and gaming to a steady 1.3% while idle and 15% when gaming.

    2
  • Stan

    I'm just going to chime in -- it started only today, goes up to 40% CPU usage when idle.

    1
  • Dillarcu

    Same problem but it started a long time ago

    1
  • AFN7

    Might be help to you guys..

     

    "Hi AFN7,

    Thanks for reaching out! The app shouldn't be using that much CPU for extended periods, though.

    For starters, can you head into your User Settings > Appearance page and make sure that Hardware Acceleration is turned on?

    If it's already on, or turning it on doesn't help, can you try a clean reinstall of the app by following the steps found in this article: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004307527? Make sure to close all Discord processes via Task Manager and double-check those AppData folders shown in the article, as well as turn off your antivirus and firewalls before reinstalling.

    If that still doesn't help, can you try these pre-release versions of the desktop client instead?

    Public Test Build (PTB) version: https://discordapp.com/api/download/ptb?platform=win
    Canary version: https://discordapp.com/api/download/canary?platform=win

    Also, to help me isolate the issue, are you in a fairly active server with lots of images and/or constant chats being sent? Does this also happen when using voice chat, or even when not connected to voice?

    Kindly keep me updated here!

    Cheers,
    Jonathan"

    1
  • Itz DarkTrax

    Same here it takes most of my cpu even with my 4 core cpu. It makes me get FPS drops in games while having the app open. And sometimes the app does not open at all without killing the discord background proccess.

    1
  • NRN

    @marcusquinn 's "fix" helped a lot reducing CPU load,especially while gaming. I didn't see higher spikes than 3% and around 400mb of ram. 

    1
  • GeekJ

    Thanks @marcusquinn , this has worked incredibly well for me as well, glad you shared this with the community!

    1
  • DynamoYT

    Discord is being **DUMB**

    1
  • Malice
    • Edited

    Well yes, Discord uses Chrome embedded. Just like skype and other web-apps do. The command-line arguments on those child processes pretty much explain it. If it weren't for discord's convenience I would absolutely not use it. Every single app has gone chrome-embedded these days. Sure it's less hassle for developers to make for cross platform, but it's absolutely horrible when it comes to resources. You're running a full fledged browser all because you need certain fixed functions. You could easily have listviews hosting server icons and friendlists, another listview for chat threads, and on native code the same would take what... 20~50MB memory? But every single electron app is now running their own master instance of chrome embed. Honestly it would just be better to run all those apps in the browser as tabs. That would take less space because it would use a single master instance.
    Apps that need to run in the background are using embedded browsers. Skype, discord, steam, slack and what not. and to boot chrome is a memory hog. Great choice for a platform. Because users have too much money to buy truckloads of RAM DIMMs yeah?

    1
  • Orion Gospel

    Same here. Discord isn't running as smooth as it used to the last 3-4 days for some reason

    1
  • tastyguava

    Aha. I get up to 40% usage on my CPU and 1GB to 3GB of usage just from Discord. Literally nothing else uses this many resources besides heavy games it's insane

    1
  • Vifours

    Hi,

    Is there eny news for this problème.

    I have 2 computer both have a CPU problem with discord, one use 40% CPU jsute for being in a chat.

    The other go up too 70% CPU when i am in video call with 4 other people.

    Is there a possible correction for this, or should i forfeit Discord ?

    Regards

    1
  • Matsyir
    • Edited

    I've started getting this issue recently, after joining a very large public server. Assumption: It seems like part of the problem is that Discord attempts to pre-load all your servers' messages, but this is very problematic when you're in a lot of servers, and some have a large/active userbase. I was already in a few decently large ones and surprisingly never had issues, but this new one was ridiculously large - 150k+ members with 50k+ active, which includes an unrestricted public text chat AND voice chat, which are both constantly out of hand.

    I can understand the benefit of pre-loading messages, but there should definitely be a toggle for this. It's especially a problem when I boot my PC, load up Discord into my small private server with 5 friends in order to work from home, and Discord is suddenly taking 60%+ CPU and freezing up my entire PC since it's endlessly trying to cache/pre-load the spam messages from the massive server I had no intention of taking a peek at on that day. I'm starting to feel like I should just leave any public communities I'm in and stick to small friend-only servers. (The issue was fixed by leaving the newly joined massive server, but now I'm concerned about all the other large servers I'm in as well. Have I been wasting CPU/bandwidth on all these this entire time??)

    1
  • Mr. Crapper

    Weirdly when I disabled hardware acceleration  my CPU went from:

    with it on: 15-23%
    with it off: 0,4-15%

    1
  • Grens 101

    Disabling Hardware Acceleration and CPU goes from 20% to 0.1% at idle (on PC)

     

    1
  • Grizlybaer

    Been happening to me today i have an i7 10th gen, 32 gigs of ram, and an nvidia rtx 2070... i don't think it should be running so hot

    1
  • GreenReaper
    • Edited

    I found a significant decrease for me was achieved by disabling "Display current activity as a status message". Discord likely uses WMI or similar for this to get process data, which can result in a lot of CPU activity.

     

    The setting is under Activity Settings/Activity Status in case you want to give it a go yourself (have Task Manager open to see if it has an impact).

    1
  • Trumpediet

    Viber is literally the same as Discord, but my God it uses so much less CPU and RAM, just switch to Viber or use the web version, that's that, like literally.

    1
  • Yiss
    • Edited

    it will only get 20-60% cpu usage if discord is open, minimize discord and see again, unless you have your discord open on 2nd monitor you wont have your discord framedropping your games too much. inside a voice chat i get 6-11% cpu usage, still big but not as much as you guys reported

    1
  • Slion
    • Edited

    > Restarting the application does not help.

    Actually that's not true. Restarting the app fixed it somehow. 
    However just doing "Quit Discord" from the system tray icon was not enough.
    I needed to go in Task Manager to kill the process.
    Then just start the app again and the issue is gone it seems.
    Hope it won't creep back so often.

    1
  • Andrew Witte

    I have the same issue 100% of the time if the app is closed. It happened on my old Win10 install & a clean install of Win11. It also happens after the app updates & restarts. Some Discord instance never quits & just sucks up a single core each time app is closed. It will stay this way for hours. Has been an issue for at least a year. Please fix.

    1
  • Andrew Witte

    So I uninstalled and deleted all files in this path "C:\Users%username%\AppData\Local\Discord".

    It seems some Updater exe & cache file doesn't get removed when uninstalling.

    Also uninstalling Discord doesn't have any options to remove user settings. Guys come on... please fix the uninstaller at min so it actually removes everything so clean installs can be performed.

    1
  • Eleazar

    A mi me sucede lo mismo, me consume un 70% de CPU incluso después de 5 minutos de haber cerrado Discord desde la barra de tareas

    Actualmente tengo Discord cerrado por completo y sigue consumiendo recursos

    1
  • Greatnhc

    I have exactly same thing, it's actually eat 30% of my CPU, and slow all my other program.

    0

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