Website version of OneNote brings Raspberry Pi to its knees

Hi everyone,

Yesterday I fired up my Raspberry Pi 3B+ to begin prepping it for use with this electronics project kit that I bought. Normally the Pi doesn’t perform too horribly, considering the hardware that it’s made of. I mean, it gets to the desktop fairly quickly, and if you’re just browsing the web or doing light programming or whatever, it’s not bad.

However I wanted to bring up some of my OneNote notes, so I went to the OneNote website and logged in. Immediately I could tell it started to struggle — just bringing up the first list of sections took some time, and then when I tried to go deeper, I noticed the CPU meter in the upper-right corner of the screen hit 100%, and then it just stayed there. After a couple more minutes went by with no response from the device or the OS, I decided it had gotten stuck, so I cut the power and rebooted.

I guess my question is, should it be not surprising that rendering a web app like OneNote would cause the Pi to crumble like that? I mean, is it all the Javascript going on underneath that is too much for it to handle?