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Flash Player even worse in Snow Leopard?

204353

204353

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Original poster
Jul 13, 2008
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I've noticed that since upgrading to Snow Leopard this morning Flash videos and ads seem to be using a lot more CPU power, hence causing my fans to spin all the way up whenever I watch an HQ YouTube video or visit a Flash-busy webpage, including some on MacRumors...

This is running on my MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU. It seems that Flash is taking up roughly double the CPU power that it did on Leopard.

See the attached screen shot and you'll see that Flash Player comes up as an individual Safari plug-in in Activity Monitor. It averages around 95% when watching a YouTube video. That's almost an entire core's worth of power being used (since each core contributes a 100% value, dual-core totals 200%).

Has anyone else experienced this?
 

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The Flash player included in Snow Leopard isn't the latest version. Install the latest from Adobe.com and check again. Probably won't make much difference though :(

Alternative: install the ClickToFlash Safari plugin. There's a setting that lets you force YouTube to display H.264 video instead of Flash. It's great :D
 
drlunanerd said:
The Flash player included in Snow Leopard isn't the latest version. Install the latest from Adobe.com and check again. Probably won't make much difference though :(

Alternative: install the ClickToFlash Safari plugin. There's a setting that lets you force YouTube to display H.264 video instead of Flash. It's great :D
Click to expand...

Ah! Flash Player is gonna take 20 minutes to download, but in the meantime I just tried out ClickToFlash. Pretty cool! Certainly seems to help, although YouTube's in-video comments (speech bubbles) don't pop up.

It's averaging about 40% for a high-quality YouTube video using the H.264 QuickTime plug-in. Thanks for the tip! :)
 
You're just noticing it more because it's a separate process. Flash has always been poor, it's good Apple separated it out. It doesn't really use over 100% of the CPU, check the load at the time it says this and it will tell a different story.
 
I noticed this at first, but after a few hours of burning in and a restart it seems fine.
 
I have got the same issue.. i am on safari with one window could use up to 70% of CPU usage.. that's terrible!
 
Flash takes around 50-70% cpu for me in both leopard and snow leopard which is still horrible

In windows it takes between 20 and 30% :/
 
drlunanerd said:
The Flash player included in Snow Leopard isn't the latest version. Install the latest from Adobe.com and check again. Probably won't make much difference though :(

Alternative: install the ClickToFlash Safari plugin. There's a setting that lets you force YouTube to display H.264 video instead of Flash. It's great :D
Click to expand...
Is there something like that for Firefox?
 
NT1440 said:
:eek:

What kind of connection do you have!?!?!?!
Click to expand...

I'm supposed to have a 6Mb broadband line. :p It's only Flash Player that experiences such awful download speeds, for some strange reason... Maybe Adobe hates me.

All normal downloads go at between 500 Kb/s to 1500 Kb/s for me. :rolleyes:

And yes, the Flash CPU usage increase is definitely not imaginary. I used to monitor Safari in iStat Menus (when Flash Player was listed as a part of the browser). It never got up to 95% like the plug-in does now... It would be at about 50-70% for YouTube HD. I'm only talking about high quality at the moment!
 
adamk77 said:
I can't believe I didn't know about this until now. This thing is simply awesome!

I think I can say my forum browsing today has paid off today :D
Click to expand...

It's great isn't it, kudos to all the contributing developers. Happy to share :)

I have to be honest I've been frustrated this past couple of days that seemingly basic questions about Snow Leopard have gone unanswered on MR, or people trying to pass off guesses as facts. The signal to noise ratio is getting particularly bad :(
 
paulbeattie87 said:
You're just noticing it more because it's a separate process. Flash has always been poor, it's good Apple separated it out. It doesn't really use over 100% of the CPU, check the load at the time it says this and it will tell a different story.
Click to expand...

The only reason it is listed separately is due to the plugin being 32-bit and Safari now being 64-bit.

Apple's solution is very good for this (and is so far the only browser I have seen that deals with this situation well).
 
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