Been frustrated with chatgpt freezing in long chats for months. thought it was a server issue. turns out it is not.
Chatgpt renders every single message in your browser at once. a 300 message chat means your browser is juggling thousands of live dom elements simultaneously. the longer the chat the worse it gets until the tab freezes completely.
I opened devtools and watched the memory climb with every new message. at around 200 messages my browser was using over 1gb of ram just for that one tab.
Once i understood the problem i built a fix for myself. intercepts the conversation data before react renders it and trims it to only the recent messages. tested on a 1865 message chat, went from freezing to instant. still shows a live counter so you can see exactly how much faster it is running.
if you are dealing with this too, happy to share what i built. curious if others have noticed the same thing.
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