We recently made a one-line change that massively reduced GPU usage, specifically:

- Intel integrated graphics: 60% reduction

- AMD Radeon: 40% reduction

- Apple M1: 10% reduction

What was the change? We removed "opacity: 85%" from the <canvas> element. We were using opacity to slightly darken the animation but now we just darken the texture image directly.

Would love to read more about this.

We just massively reduced GPU utilization on Wormhole for a second time (as of May 12). Give it a try and let me know if you still have issues.

GPU utilization when window is full screen, 4K resolution:

Chrome:

  - Radeon: 70% -> 15%

  - M1: 65% -> 29%

Firefox:

  - Radeon: 60% -> 8%

  - M1: 55% -> 23%

Safari:

  - 15% Radeon + 75% Intel -> 8% Radeon + 8% Intel

  - M1: 75% -> 35%

A bit more detail: We're running into the limits of WebGL. It seems just rendering a white screen at 60fps at 4K resolution is enough to make people's fans turn on.

So we reduce the frame-rate when the wormhole is not warping (render every 3rd frame). We also lower the resolution and scale it up.

You can "hide" it with uBlock Origin by blocking large media elements in the popup.

Thanks, much better experience

100% agree - I've used Wormhole a few times when I try to quickly get data into interactive VM sessions, because it works great otherwise, but the graphics consistently grind the whole thing to a halt.

I really don't get the reasoning. It looks kind of cool, but it makes it super unusable for a bunch of use cases from very old computers to interactive sessions on raspberry pis to constrained VMs. And those are exactly the kind of places where I want friendly easy tools to copy files across for quick system admin or to get logs back out! Doesn't seem like a good tradeoff.

I use rclone serve for this task:

rclone serve http ./dir/or.file --addr :9000

File/s can be grabbed with curl/get etc or a browser

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27060566

Set webgl.disabled to true if you're using Firefox.

And if you have a sucky connection, it's slow has hell to load.

Sorry to hear the site was slow for you. We get pretty good scores on Lighthouse and from real-world data according to https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

What OS, browser, and connection type/speed did you use?

Ubuntu, Firefox, sucky country adsl with unkown speed.

I don't mind for the upload to be slow, I just let it run, but getting to the page should not be.

I mean, this galaxy.jpg file is a third of you webpack JS bundle size!

It has no added value for me. I get the cool factor, I know it's pretty, but still.

You could add a "fast" or "lite" or similar subdomain that avoids anything like the complaints that have been shared here. Not perfect (the default should be the best), but at least you could avoid this problems as a user.

Turn on "reduced motion" setting on your Mac.

Wouldn’t it be easier for you to manage what you expend your battery on?

Great idea, do you have any suggestions that will help?