Adobe Flash High CPU Usage (Mac)

Just an update - still working with engineering, no luck yet with Flash.  They had me try the HTML client for Adobe Connect, but it isn't fully functional even though the CPU usage is way less.

Flash Player is a language runtime.  Other people write software in ActionScript, which they compile to bytecode, which we interpret and do all of the low-level processing stuff for -- like allocating and tracking memory, rendering pixels to the screen, etc.  Flash isn't a video player or conferencing software, although you can write those things using Flash technology.  Like any language, it's possible to write code that uses lots of resources, and there isn't a generic way to prevent software from being written inefficiently, or from using the available system resources.

Your computer has fans designed to keep the CPU cool when it's operating at capacity.  It's annoying when they come on because they're loud, but that's what they're there for.  Flash isn't "overheating" the CPU.  It's using the available CPU resources, and the computer decides that active thermal management is required at some point.

Anyway, the really important question is "Why isn't Flash able to offload some of this work to the GPU?".  Ideally, we'd ask the GPU to decode video using the dedicated graphics hardware.  When that's not available -- either because the video isn't encoded in a way that would allow us to leverage hardware, or because those resources are unavailable (they're in-use, they're disabled in the browser, etc.), then we're going to fall back to software-based decoding, which puts a load on the CPU.

There's no magic knob to turn to make video decoding more efficient in software.  That stuff is industry-standard (we license the video codecs on your behalf), and have been tuned for maximal performance.  The way that you get performance and power/thermal efficiency beyond that is to use the dedicated video processing silicon on the GPU.

A couple suggestions:

- Make sure hardware acceleration is enabled in Flash (it's on by default) and in your browser (also on by default)

- Experiment with the available browsers, and make sure you're up-to-date on OS and browser patches

- See if installing the Adobe Connect plug-in helps.
     Your content should play in the Connect Add-In instead of Flash at that point.  Adobe Connect Downloads and Updates

-  Reboot, if you haven't recently, and make sure that the connect session is the only application and tab running.

     (The thought here is that you're making sure the GPU isn't in a weird state, and you're not fighting any other running applications for access to it -- it has a finite set of resources, and if we can't get access to it, we'll fail back to software).

Anyway, it's pretty weird that this wasn't a problem with your older laptop, but Connect definitely does fire up the fans on my Macbook from time to time.  It's really dependent on how that course content is published and put together.  Connect has been around a long time, and like Flash, just because hardware acceleration is available, doesn't mean that the content is taking advantage of it (or that it was an available option when the content was created).

The latest, greatest versions of Connect actually use web-native technologies (HTML5 and JavaScript), so it's more an issue of running old content in modern contexts.  You should definitely complain to the school about the experience and encourage them to look into it.  I'm sure that if they're licensing Connect from us now, that our support folks would be happy to talk to them about how to optimize the experience.

What exactly do you see in Activity Monitor?