A browser tab freezing solid while you are just trying to look at the console is a rendering problem, not a sign that your computer cannot handle the job — a live console has no built-in brake on how fast it tries to display incoming text, and a plugin in a fast error loop can produce far more of it than any browser can draw.
Why it is the browser that suffers, not the server
The console streams output over a WebSocket the instant the server produces it, with no throttling built into a simple live-console view. A plugin printing a full stack trace on every tick — thousands of lines a second — hands the browser far more text than its rendering engine can append to the page in real time, and the tab locks up trying to keep pace with a feed that never lets up. The server process itself is unaffected by any of this; it is purely a client-side rendering bottleneck triggered by the volume of what it is being asked to display.
What to do
- Do not reopen the live console while the loop is still active
Reopening it immediately reproduces the freeze — the flood has to stop at the source first.
- Connect via SFTP instead and open
/logs/latest.login a text editorA static file has no live feed to overwhelm anything; a text editor reads it at its own pace.
- Find the plugin responsible from the repeated error and remove or fix it
The same error repeating thousands of times a second in the log names exactly what is looping.
The live console opens normally and stays responsive once the offending plugin is removed.