Participant

Question

Flash player opens ALOT in task manager

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
January 8, 2016
6 replies
969 views

Hi,

The title kinda says it the longer i use my pc the more it opens. I've had it go up to 48 times and it slows my pc down alot.

I run windows 7 Ultimate with Mozilla browser.

Thank you.

This topic has been closed for replies.

jarif36507266Author

Participant

Oke this may sound really wierd but i think its notdoing it anymore.

I now have 8 tabs open and 4 Youtube tabs and i cant even see the plugin once.

So i think its fixed but i will update everything and if you want i will send you the ifo you aksed before if you want to dig in.

Thanks for the help

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

YouTube typically uses HTML5 for playback these days. It may be that you don't have any tabs open that use Flash at the moment.

You *will* have a better experience with 64-bit Firefox for a number of reasons though, it's worth the switch.

jarif36507266Author

Participant

Oke thank you for the answer but the thing is that even when i close firefox the players don't close with it. Its like it keeps building upany ideas?

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

Okay, I'm curious now. If you're not running the latest Firefox and Flash Player, you should do that. There are lots of interdependencies between Flash and the browsers, and mismatched versions might not always play well.

If the issue persists, then I'm really curious. Either there's a third party application/plug-in spawning the instances, or you're seeing symptoms that I haven't heard anyone complain about, and haven't seen in our internal testing. That's pretty interesting, but it seems unlikely. We have ~2.5Bn installations running, so the odds that I'll hear about a unique symptom from a single person are pretty low. It's usually more like a tidal wave of email.

If you don't care about the mystery, moving to 64-bit Firefox is going to be a huge improvement on multiple fronts. Everyone that I've talked to over the last couple months has been really happy with the switch -- particularly people that were experiencing brutal stability problems with Flash. None of them had this symptom, but 64-bit Firefox eliminates one of the two Flash processes and changes how Flash is invoked. I'm pretty confident that you'll see things go away.

Also, if you're not running an up-to-date virus scanner or malware tool, you might want to take those for a spin. MalwareBytes (www.malwarebytes.org) is free and well respected, as is Windows Defender. Microsoft Security Essentials - Microsoft Windows

If you are interested in digging into this, there's no guarantee that I'll get it fixed (experience says it's probably going to come down to something boring like compatibility with an an ad-blocking plugin, an off-brand antivirus package, or some other non-browser piece of software doing something weird), but I'm happy to go on that journey.

First things first, what versions of Firefox and Flash are in play?

Is this Windows 7 Service Pack 1?

Have you run Windows Update recently (you should do that if the answer is no)?

Do you detect malware running MalwareBytes and a reputable, updated anti-virus product? If so, does the issue go away after you clean it up? (We should talk about the implications if this actually comes up.)

When you have lots of processes spawned, are they launched by Firefox, or by another process?

How to Determine the Parent Process of a Running Process in Windows? - The Winhelponline Blog

If you launch Firefox and go to Help > Start With Add-Ons Disabled, do you experience this problem?

If not, disable all of the plugins but Flash, then re-enable them one-by-one. When the symptom comes back, what plug-in was it?

That's probably a good place to start.

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

Each Tab is a new browser process, and in 32-bit Firefox, each Flash Player instance has a broker and a low-integrity process, so if you have 24 tabs open that all have SWFs (Flash movies) on them, then you get 48 processes.

If you have a 64-bit version of Windows 7 installed, you'll probably find that running the 64-bit Beta for Firefox is going to give you a much better experience all around. Unlike 32-bit Firefox, 64-bit Firefox includes a native NPAPI plug-in sandbox, which obviates the need for using our own retrofit solution. This solution is more efficient in general, and may help with the performance issues.

That said, things like the infinite scroll (Tumblr) don't always allow the browser to free up unused things, so refreshing periodically can free up a tremendous amount of resources that accumulate over time, and just keeping the number of tabs down are good ideas. You can create bookmarks that open groups of tabs, so that you can conveniently close and open a bunch of tabs simultaneously, if you have certain tasks that use a few tabs, etc. Tabs are cool, but they're not free.

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

You can find 64-bit Firefox Beta here: Mozilla Firefox Web Browser — Download Firefox Beta in your language — Mozilla

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