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Why is flash handling subpar?

daneoni

daneoni

macrumors G5
Original poster
Mar 24, 2006
12,036
1,957
I was just at this BlackBerry site and my CPU percentage jumped to a range of 54-49% and fans started kicking in. Windows fares better. By the way this is a Core 2 Duo notebook. I kept thinking to myself.."i wonder how a G4 would fare".

Why does it take so many CPU cycles, is flash handling just not great in OS X?
 
I have a dual 500 Mhz G4 PowerMac and I just went to your Blackberry Pearl site. My CPU percentage jumped as high as 94%.
 
daneoni said:
I was just at this BlackBerry site and my CPU percentage jumped to a range of 54-49% and fans started kicking in. Windows fares better. By the way this is a Core 2 Duo notebook. I kept thinking to myself.."i wonder how a G4 would fare".

Why does it take so many CPU cycles, is flash handling just not great in OS X?
Click to expand...

Flash on Mac OS X is a joke. Nothing beats a slow computer for pointing out poorly written code. In my case, a B&W G3 @ 400 MHz / original Radeon. The Blackberry Pearl site makes my old G3 sluggish and unresponsive. The flash animation performed not more than 3 frames per second. Closing the browser window took as much as 8 seconds.

By comparison, my old Pentium II/350/GEForce2MX200 performs A LOT better on the same site.

Flash on Mac OS X is slug on valium.
 
Does your CPU do that with every flash page you visit or just the BlackBerry site? If it doesn't jump that high with every flash site you visit, I'm going to lay the blame partly on the Blackberry site's flash.

I'd still submit this to the WebKit team, though, so they can take a look at what's causing the slowdown and fix it.
 
daneoni said:
."i wonder how a G4 would fare".
Click to expand...

On my iBook 1,33 G4 it's between 65-75 % CPU, which is not great. And using the latest Webkit. It's around the same with the latest Camino-nightly.

That said, the animation on the BB-site looks pretty fancy, maybe some rendering being done, etc.? So I wouldn't want to generalise this for all flash.
 
epochblue said:
Does your CPU do that with every flash page you visit or just the BlackBerry site? If it doesn't jump that high with every flash site you visit, I'm going to lay the blame partly on the Blackberry site's flash.

I'd still submit this to the WebKit team, though, so they can take a look at what's causing the slowdown and fix it.
Click to expand...

The pearl site may be OTT but even Youtube or CNet videos make my percentage jump to around 30%..maybe 20% on a good day.
 
I just went to the site on my P4 3.4 GHz running Windows 2000 and Firefox browser. Hyperthreading turned on.
I get about 45%, which would I think translate to about 90% with hyperthreading turned off.

So ... it looks cool ... but ...
 
core duo mac mini and i get that too. its got really intesvive graphics though. i don't see that much of a problem.
 
On my 2x2.5 GHz G5 PM I got 55% (of 1 CPU) in Safari and 65% with Firefox 1.5. On my 2.33 C2D MBP I get 50% (of 1 CPU) with Safari.
 
daneoni said:
The pearl site may be OTT but even Youtube or CNet videos make my percentage jump to around 30%..maybe 20% on a good day.
Click to expand...

Oh, I realize that the WebKit team has some work to do getting Flash to be more efficient, but my point was simply that I don't usually see spikes in CPU utilization like that on other flash sites. Therefore, the site itself it (at least) partly to blame.
 
epochblue said:
Oh, I realize that the WebKit team has some work to do getting Flash to be more efficient, but my point was simply that I don't usually see spikes in CPU utilization like that on other flash sites. Therefore, the site itself it (at least) partly to blame.
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm missing something, but Flash content is handled by the Flash browser plugin, no? I update mine fairly regularly - r45 just came out earlier this month.
 
Using Opera, i managed to get 38% used on my MBP. The flash support on Mac needs some work.
 
Yep, Flash sucks bigtime on Mac OS.

I might try and download a newer version, maybe it helps (a bit).

Adobe should clean this up asap
 
Installed adobe flash 9....no noticeable difference. Oh well...
 
daneoni said:
Why does it take so many CPU cycles, is flash handling just not great in OS X?
Click to expand...

First of all, a reinstall of Flash according to this page helps make Flash faster:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=2dda3d81

Secondly, nearly 100% of a single core is taken up with downloading content. For example, while watching a YouTube video, Flash downloads the video in the background while I'm watching. During this download phase, the video runs very slowly and a core is at 100%. After the video has finished downloading (but while I'm still watching), the video runs at normal speed and a core drops to, perhaps 4%. I've yet to find a solution to this second problem.

[MacBook 2Ghz Core Duo, 2Gb, OSX10.4.9, Flash 9,0,28,0]
 
rbirkby said:
I've yet to find a solution to this second problem.

[MacBook 2Ghz Core Duo, 2Gb, OSX10.4.9, Flash 9,0,28,0]
Click to expand...

Upgrading to 9,0,45,0 has fixed the high CPU while downloading issue. Or perhaps this was fixed by simply restarting Firefox?...
 
Hahaha it's killing my machine to. Thats poor webdesign at it's best, it has nothing to do with webkit and everything to do with the site dev not doing enough testing.

Picture1.png


Picture2.png
 
Blubbert said:
Using Opera, i managed to get 38% used on my MBP. The flash support on Mac needs some work.
Click to expand...

So that's less than 20% of overall system resources, right? Since there are two cores, and so processor usage can be as high as 200%. How much lower is the expectation? Do you really expect that site to run in 5% of one core? Does it do that for anyone in Windows with a CD or C2D?
 
From an older Windows PC...

P4 2.4 GHz, averaging 90% CPU utilization (only one core)...

Framerate looked surprisingly decent. But yeah, a crazy site.
 
on my MDD G4 867mhz duel. 125% of CPU time. didnt notice the lag due to haveing 2 cores. I was supprised.
 
The grandparent makes a good point about Flash in general though. While I am very impressed with the wealth of online services Flash has been able to deliver us, the technology is definitely not efficient. Feels like Java kind of. I think Adobe still has ways to go before it can convince us to let go of our desktop software. Incidentally, I did go to other flash-based sites and CPU-usage was not low.

BTW, a nice feature of Camino is the ability to prevent Flash from loading automatically. At least that will let you experience the "experience" when you want to.
 
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