Dear Digg, your Sony ad is killing my browser

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I considered this evening to be pretty special for me -- it's one of those rare days where I could have dinner peacefully all by myself.  Not that I enjoyed eating dinner alone, but sometimes what a geek man wants is simply quiet time with a computer.  :D

At least that's what I thought to be until I notice that my CPU consumption start revving when I surfed through fine news aggregator site like Digg. 

I'm pretty sure I have nothing running in the background at all.  I'm staring at the CPU meter in the task manager start rising up like inflation rate.

(apologize for the sloppy screenshot)

As you can see, on my Vista desktop (w/ Intel Core Duo) I have reading from 3 different performance dashboards:

  1. CPU meter (get it here).  This one read 53% for Core 1 and 42% for Core 2.
  2. More CPU meters (default Vista gadget).  These two have the same readings -- 49% and 62% respectively.
  3. Just so to balance things out, I also launch up ResMon (from Task Manager, go to Performance tab, click on "Resource Monitor" button).  This one displays CPU consumption of 50%.

So...what is going on?  Is something/someone trying to do something funny?  I tried to eliminate any doubt, so I quickly kill IE and boom, the CPU all went flat.  I repeated this exercise a couple of times to convince that this wassn't any type of worm or virus or trojan or swarm thing attack.  Each time I launched up IE and browsed to Digg.com, the CPU cycle started to take off again.  Going to any other sites had very minimal impact on the CPU.  Only Digg front page.

To cross reference and eliminate any remaining doubt, I tried Firefox.  The same high CPU usage pattern was observed again.

I looked deeper into the site, and the only suspicious thing about Digg is the new Sony ad (at least I thought it was new today).  Hovering the mouse over the ad revealed a bit more interesting functionality -- the mouse trails in a colorful droplet design.  Very cool indeed.

Unfortunately, it's probably this mouse trail effect which was causing the degrading performance due to its intense graphics (for its size) and event-based programming.  In fact, going to Digg Video section, which had different ad did not cause any resource utilization unlike the front page.

So, this message is probably for both Digg and the ad designer.  Having a cool ad is great, but please make sure it doesn't kill your (intended) viewers' machine.  Performance test is a good thing.